OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 




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[Elliot & Fry. 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



Centenary Biograpfes 



Oliver Wendell Holmes 



BY 

LEWIS W. TOWNSEND 



LONDON : 

HEADLEY BROTHERS 

BISHOPSGATE STREET WITHOUT, E.C. 






HEADLEY BROTHERS, 

PRINTERS, 

LONDON ; AND ASHFORD, KENT. 



304 c 



PREFACE. 

To an increasing number of people Oliver Wendell 
Holmes is the author of the " Autocrat of the Break- 
fast Table," and it is chiefly to readers of this class that 
this biography is offered, as giving a brief narrative 
of his life and a critical estimate of his work sufficient 
to indicate his striking appeal to his own generation 
and his interest to ours. 

No exhaustive treatment of his works is required ; 
he saw rather than foresaw ; he apprehended what 
his age was seeking to teach, and delivered a message 
that was almost intuitively accepted by the genera- 
tion following his own, — to which it belonged as a 
birthright. 

But his reputation must depend not upon any 
lessons he taught, however important these were, 
and whether they have been learned or not, but upon 
his fine and even unique literary gift. Oliver Wendell 
Holmes will always remain an important figure in 
literary history from his having adventured — con- 
sciously or unconsciously — into a new country, and 
established his lordship there. 

In preparing this volume I have been particularly 
indebted to the official biography by Mr. Morse, the 
monograph on Oliver Wendell Holmes by W. Jerrold, 
and an excellent article in the Quarterly Review of 
1895. 

L.W.T. 



CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. — THE BEGINNINGS OF THINGS I 

II. — STUDENT DAYS IN EUROPE - - 29 

III. — DOCTOR AND LECTURER - - - 46 

IV. — "the autocrat" 67 

V. — POET - - - - 87 

vi. — " the professor " - - - iio 

vii. — novelist - 125 

viii. — "the guardian angel" - - 135 

ix. — biographer and traveller - - 148 

x. — " the last leaf " - - - 163 

xi. — conclusion - i70 



CHAPTER I. 

THE BEGINNING OF THINGS. 

Know old Cambridge ? Hope you do. 
Born there ? Don't say so ! I was, too. 
Born in a house with a gambrel-roof, — 
Standing still, if you must have proof, — 
(" Gambrel ? Gambrel ? " Let me beg, 
You'll look at a horse's hinder leg ; 
First great angle above the hoof, 
That's the gambrel : hence gambrel-roof.) 
Nicest place that ever was seen. 

— The Professor of the Breakfast Table. 

"\A 7E can die out of many houses, but the 
house itself can die but once, and so 
real is the life of a house to one who has dwelt 
in it — more especially the life of a house which 
held him in dreamy infancy ; in restless boy- 
hood ; in passionate youth — so real, I say, is 
its life that it seems as if something like a soul 
of it must outlast its perishing frame/ ' 

Oliver Wendell Holmes was getting grey when 
he wrote this, and nearing the age he so swiftly 
attains and keeps in our minds ; but it was 
of the old gambrel-roofed house where he was 



2 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

born that he was thinking, when he wrote in 
this vein of tender reminiscence ; the house 
that so haunted his imagination in later life, 
and seemed so to colour all his impressions 
that it has become of more than ordinary bio- 
graphical interest. 

It stood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which 
was no more than a country village in Oliver 
Wendell Holmes' early days — " with large, open 
woodland spaces. As the seat of the oldest 
University in America it preserved in its 
atmosphere some of the cloistered quiet and 
intellectual repose that reminded Clough of 
Oxford. Its few towers rose above elms, lindens 
and horse-chestnuts, which had seen Massa- 
chusetts a colony. Through its green and 
purple salt marshes the Charles River slipped 
smoothly to the sea." 

The house itself was rich in associations. 
General Ward made it his headquarters during 
the early part of the Revolution ; Washington 
was frequently seen there in consultation with 
his officers ; in one of its rooms " Bunker's 
Hill " was planned and discussed, and the floor 
was dented with the butts of the muskets of 
the soldiery ; in another Warren slept on the 
night preceding that battle, and President 
Langdon prayed God's blessing on the issue. 

Associations of another kind, perhaps, more 
deeply impressed themselves upon Oliver, and 



The Beginning of Things. 3 

evoke our interest. The portrait of his great- 
grandmother, Dorothy Q , disfigured by 

the British rapier, hung from the walls, and in 
the parlour was the chair in which Lord Percy 
sat to have his hair dressed. 

The honest mansion made no pretensions. 
" Accessible, companionable, holding its hand 
out to all, comfortable, respectable, and even 
in its way dignified, but not imposing/ ' although 
the atmosphere created by those who lived 
in it may almost be so characterised. We 
have a sense of that old-world and somewhat 
heavy refinement and culture as we read of 
the books, the dark furniture, the claw-footed 
chairs, and the family silver. 

The rooms were low-pitched, but spacious, 
lending a sense of freedom to those who dwelt 
in them ; but the garrets, which so often 
figure in Oliver Wendell Holmes' reminiscences, 
and which he says are so like the sea shore 
where wrecks are thrown up and slowly go 
to pieces, deserve mention as making the first 
discovery, since authenticated, of his poetical 
temperament. 

Behind the house " was the backyard, with 
its woodhouse, its carriage-house, its barn, 
and — let me not forget — its pigstye," and 
to one side was the field of four acres, which, 
to his childish apprehension, seemed of such 
vast extent, while on the other side smiled 



4 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

the old-fashioned garden, where grew the lilac, 
the scent of which, whenever it drifted to him 
in youth, or manhood, or old age, was fraught 
with power to carry him back to the old house 
and other days, with or without his willing it. 

From the western window he could look out 
over the vast expanse of common where stood 
the " Washington " elm, " under whose shadow 
the great leader first drew his sword at the 
head of an American army," and, in the great 
distance, " the hills of the horizon " stood up 
like gigantic figures on whom the sun and the 
clouds lay. 

It was from this centre, as he says, that 
he felt his way into the creations beyond, 
and it was in the house we have been speaking 
of that he was born in that memorable year 
1809, which also gave birth to Tennyson, Darwin, 
Poe, Mendelssohn, Lincoln, and was the cen- 
tenary of the birth of Dr. Johnson. In this 
home he remained until his maturity, and 
gained his first great experience of love, of 
death and of remorse, in addition to the many 
impressions that tended to make him a poet, 
or came to him because he was one. 

Of his ancestors he himself always spoke 
with pride, and although he had no liking 
for hunting among ancestral remains, he had 
a very pronounced preference for the man 
who inherits family traditions and family 



The Beginning of Things. 5 

portraits, " and the cumulative humanities 
of at least four or five generations/' and he 
liked to remember that he was descended 
from families of worthy and even notable 
association, and prided himself upon his kinship 

with Dorothy Q of Norman descent, and 

Mrs. Bradstreet, the wife of one of the early 
governors of Massachusetts, and the first poetess 
of her country. 

On his mother's side he was of Dutch descent. 

Fair Cousin Wendell P 

Our ancestors were dwellers beside the Zuyder Zee. 
Both Grotius and Erasmus were countrymen of we, 
And Vondel was our namesake, though he spelt it 
with a V, 

and from his father he was descended from 
a Puritan family of consideration, who settled 
in Connecticut in the seventeenth century, 
of which he speaks in a letter to Emra Holmes. 
" My own great-great-grandfather was one 
of the first settlers of the town of Woodstock, 
Conn., where my father was born. He probably 
carried an axe on his shoulders, and thought 
himself lucky if he could keep his scalp on 
his crown. His grandson — my grandfather — 
fought the French and Indians in Canada in 
what he used to call ' the old French War/ 
the same in which Wolfe fell, and in which 
Admiral Sir Robert Holmes took part." 



6 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

This early settler was one John Holmes, 
who was spoken of as a useful man, and soon 
became a prosperous one. His son David is 
known to us as Deacon Holmes, and his son 
as an army captain and surgeon, and the 
grandfather of Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

Abiel Holmes — the father of Oliver — married 
as his second wife in 1801, Sarah Wendell, 
the daughter of the Hon. Oliver Wendell, of 
Boston, who became the mother of Oliver on 
August 29th, 1809. 

So much it is necessary to remark with 
respect to the genealogy of the subject of this 
memoir, but something must be said about 
the character of his parents. 

The Rev. Abiel Holmes came from the land 
of steady habits, and from a lineage of stern 
Puritans. He early became " imbued with 
the doctrines of Calvinism/ ' but his kindly 
nature ameliorated the rigour of his creed, 
and though he was a little " dour " in the pulpit, 
he was noted as the most delightful of sunny 
old men. 

He had entered upon his ministry of the 
First Congregational Church in Cambridge 
two vears before his third child — Oliver Wendell 
— was born, and won more than the usual 
tribute of respect from his congregation and 
neighbours. He possessed all the qualifications 
required of those who would hope to be admired, 



The Beginning of Things. 7 

and he was a much admired man. He was 
a minister ; an author of some reputation, 
writing poetry (which did not bring reputation) 
and the " Annals of America/ ' which is men- 
tioned as a careful, accurate, and useful 
history ; in addition he was a very handsome 
man, as his portrait gives sufficient evidence 
of, and the story goes that when he first settled 
at Cambridge the girls used to say, " There 
goes Holmes ! Look ! " He was certainly 
a man to inspire respect rather than affection, 
even on the part of his children, and this 
quotation from a letter which he wrote to 
his son when he was away at school, gives, 
in addition to a breath of the rigorous atmos- 
phere of the times, an insight into the character 
of Abiel Holmes, almost frigid in its reserve, 
that we could not obtain by description. 

My dear Son, 

We received your letter of the 30th Dec., and thank 
you for the wish of a Happy New Year. We cordially 
reciprocate the wish, and our desire is that you may 
improve your time and talents, and be attaining those 
virtues and graces which will make all time pleasant 
and profitable to you. . . . Your opportunities 
for improvement are very much greater than those of 
most others, and we shall expect the more accordingly. 
Be diligent in your studies, punctual in your attendance 
at the Academy, and strictly observant of its rules. 
. . . Be prudent. Be more particular when you next 
write, and let us know all about you. 



8 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

And the story is not without interest to us 
here, which tells that later in life Dr. Holmes 
found an old almanac of his father's on which 
the date of his birth had been signalised by the 
undemonstrative and scarcely sufficient note 
— " son b." 

Dr. Holmes owed much in the shaping 
of his character to his father, but perhaps he 
was more indebted to his mother for the dis- 
tinguishing qualities of his intellect. She was 
a woman of a large, emotional nature, gentle 
and sympathetic, fond of social intercourse 
and able to enter into another's mood, glad 
to dance to another's piping, and ready to weep 
with those that wept. She possessed the 
qualities that endear, and more than one of 
her acquaintances has left a tribute to her 
gentle and cheerful nature and a record of the 
love they bore her — " like that for my own 
mother," says Dr. Wyman, in writing to Oliver 
Wendell Holmes. 

The son of such parents, born into the home 
we have described, and brought up in an 
atmosphere of culture and comfort, he had 
a right to be grateful, as he said, f or " a probable 
inheritance of good instincts and a good 
name." 

It is always important to review the earliest 
years of one whose character and work we 
would understand, but when that one happens 



The Beginning of Things. 9 

to be a poet, these earliest years become all- 
important, and though it has often been said 
that there was nothing in the boyhood and 
youth of Oliver Wendell Holmes to indicate 
unusual gifts, the statement is not quite true, 
as the intensity of the impressions that certain 
events and sensations produced in him indicates 
a very susceptible nature, and the kind of 
event and sensation that left the deepest impress 
indicate the poetic temperament. We all 
retain certain impressions of our childhood, 
and can reproduce these as facts in after life, 
but these records stain themselves into the 
poet's memory, and when he recalls them it 
is in colour, or song, and with a tremulous 
emotion. " What strains and strophes of 
unwritten verse pulsate through my soul 
when I open a certain closet in the ancient 
house where I was born ! " and many similar 
ejaculations indicate how haunting were some 
of his recollections. 

The sound of the sea that many miles away 
sobbed herself to sleep against the heedless 
cliffs after a night of storm ; — the dreary 
music of the creaking wood-sleds trailing 
their loads of oak and walnut over the com- 
plaining snow ; — the " pulsating lullaby of 
the evening crickets " that was associated in 
his mind with the stillness and solemnity of 
the commencement of the Sabbath Day. Then 



io Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

the row of tall poplars had for him a sepulchral 
aspect, and the tall masts of the ships a dread 
appearance that made him run and cover 
his eyes from the sight of them. Again the 
scents of certain flowers ravished him, and 
often imagination went before to meet a 
promise, and spoiled for him the fulfilment. 
These thwarting recollections of beauty or 
pain, so trifling as scarcely to warrant mention 
of them, are enough to show us that he was 
not quite an ordinary child ; the character 
and intensity of the impression recalled alike 
indicate the poetic type of mind that must 
have received them. 

His childhood, however, was not given up 
to these sensations, and " the triumphal entry 
of the governor attended by a light horse troop " 
had the same attraction for him which " the 
pomp and circumstance of glorious war " has 
for most boys, as had also the celebration of 
the Declaration of Peace in 1815, when he 
threw up his " jocky " with other boys from 
the Dame School, and shouted " Hurraw for 
Ameriky/' and when the day was made notable 
for him by the illumination of the Colleges 
and the privilege of sitting up as late as he 
liked. 

He recalls, too, with considerable feeling, 
his timorousness as a child. Even when he 
had arrived at maturity he said he would not 



The Beginning of Things. n 

sleep in a solitary house for a small fortune, 
and as a child his nervous apprehensions 
constituted a real body of dread and caused 
him much suffering, and marred a good deal 
of his childish enjoyment. He was afraid 
of the dark, and afraid of the Devil, and listened 
with tearfulness to local reports of that inscru- 
table enemy's designs. In addition to these 
two giants of terror that pursued him there 
were ghosts in the garret, and Dr. Gamage 
prescribed ipecacuanha. 

At an early age Oliver was sent to school, 
and received his first instruction from Dame 
Prentiss, who " ruled " over young children 
in the " low studded schoolroom/' but at the 
age of ten he had outgrown this teaching, 
and took his place among the boys of Cambridge- 
port school where he had for fellow-pupils 
R. Dana, who wrote " The Buccaneer/' and 
Margaret Fuller, who became so remarkable 
a woman, and was almost worshipped by the 
transcendental mystics, and figures as the 
Miranda of Lowell's " Fable for Critics." 

Speaking of these schooldays in his auto- 
biographical notes, Dr. Holmes says, " I do not 
remember being the subject of any reproof 
or discipline at that school, although I do not 
doubt I deserved it, for I was an inveterate 
whisperer at every school I attended," but he 
remembers the master tapping him on the 



12 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

forehead with his pencil, and saying, " He 
couldn't help it if I would do so well " — an 
encouragement which he never forgot. 

He left Cambridgeport at the age of fifteen, 
and our impression of him at this time is of a 
healthy boy with the usual boyish habits and 
pleasures. He could use his jack-knife as well 
as another, could skate, and was fond of sport 
— shooting at everything that was worth a 
charge of the smallest shot he could employ 
in his old flint-lock musket ; he was sharper 
than most, and certainly had a greater pro- 
clivity for reading, as we shall see, but his 
upbringing might well account for his habits 
in this direction, as he was bumped among 
books from his earliest days, and became as 
intimate with them as a stable-boy with his 
horses, to use his own illustration. 

During these early years he was subject 
to two other educational influences of great 
importance, which he emphasises in his notes, 
and frequently mentions in his own works. 
His father's library consisted of some two 
thousand volumes, and included a great many 
standard works in addition to theology and 
sermons. Oliver grew to feel at home among 
books from his earliest days, and the influence 
of his early reading is noticeable in his poetry 
of a later day, but his habits of reading were 
peculiar, and form a striking commentary 



The Beginning of Things. 13 

upon the writings by which we know him 
best, and which appear not so much " books," 
but rather chapters from many books he might 
have written. " I read few books through/ ' 
Dr. Holmes says in speaking of his child- 
hood ; "I have always read in books rather 
than through them, and always with more 
profit from the books I have read in, than 
from the books I read through." 

Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Progress " appealed 
to his imagination, and he always speaks 
of it with due appreciation as a work of 
art, but it had a unique effect upon his 
thinking, and one contrary to the author's 
intention, as it " made the system of which 
it was the exponent more unreasonable and 
more repulsive instead of rendering it more 
attractive," and a like effect was produced 
by the study of Scott's Family Bible. " The 
narrowness and exclusiveness of his views 
waked me up more than anything else to the 
enormities of the creed which he represented." 
As a matter of fact, Oliver Wendell Holmes 
early revolted, not from Christianity, but from 
the harsh, and in some respects, cruel repre- 
sentation of it which the Calvinism of the 
New England of his day offered, and he was 
more precocious in his inquiring and independent 
attitude toward religion than in anything 
else. 



14 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

No doubt Bunyan and Scott did influence 
him in the manner he describes, but there were 
other and larger forces at work influencing the 
general mind of the time, and leading in a 
similar direction. The accident of Dr. Holmes* 
birth and upbringing early brought him under 
their influence, and we must not forget that 
the spirit of the times and the growing impa- 
tience of many with New England Calvinism, 
rather than his reading of Bunyan and Scott, 
account for his revolt from what he calls " the 
inherited servitude of my ancestors/ ' 

There were books, however, allowed him 
which engaged his mind in other directions. 
Rees' Encyclopaedia was a book to suit his 
peculiar habits of reading, and his preference 
for " confused feeding " ; a copy of Dry den, 
brutally expurgated by the summary process 
of tearing out the leaves, fell ijito his hands ; 
Pope's " Homer " charmed him in childhood 
as well as in old age, and before he could write 
he remembers singing his own heroic couplets 
made in imitation of Gray and Pope and 
Dryden. 

These works, and the " Galaxy of American 
Poets," which contained poems by Bryant, 
among others, are the most noteworthy of 
those he mentions as influencing his early 
years. The list is not long, nor particularly 
noteworthy, but it is interesting to remark 



The Beginning of Things. 15 

that there is more than the usual relation 
between his early reading and the works of 
his maturity. 

The other influence to which he owed a 
good deal was due to his father's ministerial 
calling, in consequence of which Oliver met 
many of that profession who left more than 
a passing impression upon him. 

" Some of my pleasantest Sundays were 
those when I went with my father who 
was exchanging pulpits with a neighbouring 
clergyman. We jogged off together in one of 
the old-fashioned, two-wheeled chaises. The 
clergymen with whom my father exchanged 
in those days were weak in the theological 
joints/ ' and consequently, as he thought, 
pleasanter men. Both when he went with his 
father and when he stayed at home he was in 
the company t)f ministers, and with the quick, 
instinctive way of children, discovered them 
to be of two classes. There were those who 
preached as dying men to dying men, and 
those who spoke as living men to living men, 
and Oliver had a distinct preference for the 
latter, probably because they could play with 
children even on Sundays, and brought a sunny 
atmosphere with them, in striking contrast 
to the gloom and foreboding that stalked 
in dark companionship with some of the other 
class. 



16 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

It seems probable that Oliver's father would 
have been pleased to see him embrace the 
ministry, and at school at Andover he was 
under influence that led many to follow that 
calling. One may be glad, however, that he 
escaped with his life and humour from a pro- 
fession that he had no right to, and it is meet 
that a tribute of thanks be offered to that 
minister who looked and talked so like an 
undertaker, and in consequence seems to have 
acted as a strong deterrent upon Oliver, and 
guarded the gates of his profession against 
him. 

But it would be unfair to suggest that the 
majority were of this type, or that the 
impression left by these few " wailing 
poittrinaires " was of the deepest. Writing 
more than half a century later, Dr. Holmes 
says, 

" How grandly the procession of the old 
clergymen who filled our pulpit from time 
to time and passed the day under our roof, 
marches before my closed eyes ! At their 
head the most venerable David Osgood, with 
massive front and shaggy, over-shadowing 
eyebrows. Following in the train mild-eyed 
John Foster, with the lambent aurora of a 
smile about his mouth which not even the 
Sabbath could subdue. ... It was a real 
delight to have one of these good, hearty, 



The Beginning of Things. 17 

happy, benignant old clergymen pass the 
Sunday with us, and I can remember some 
whose advent made the day feel almost like 
' Thanksgiving/ " 

One incident must be referred to before 
leaving his childhood. In all ages there have 
been men capable of complete change from a 
word, a book, a look, an act striking into their 
life from the external world, and something 
like a revolution took place in Oliver when, 
as he says, " I paid ten cents for a peep through 
the telescope on the Common, and saw the 
transit of Venus. ... I have never got 
over the shock of my discovery. There are 
some things we believe but do not know ; there 
are others that we know, but in our habitual 
state of mind hardly believe. I knew something 
of the relative size of the planets. . . . 
The Earth on which I lived has never been the 
same to me since that time. All my human 
sentiments, all my religious beliefs, all my 
conception of my relation in space for fractional 
rights in the Universe seemed to have undergone 
a change/' 

This experience, for it seems to have been 
such, perhaps first determined his mind in a 
direction that led him eventually to rest in the 
belief that " this colony of the Universe is an 
educational institution as far as the human 
race is concerned/ ' and to this theory he clung, 



1 8 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

and upon it he based his hope for himself and 
his fellow-men. 

At the age of fifteen, " genial, joyous, sound 
in health, buoyant in spirit, and with the keenest 
zest for hie," he took a step into a larger world, 
and left home to continue his education at 
Philip's Academy, Andover. The songs his 
mother had sung to him were still echoing in 
in his mind. " The blue sky overhead, the 
green expanse under foot, the scenery and 
orchestra of Nature as yet uninterpreted by 
language," had sunk into his consciousness 
and was doing its work quietly and unbeknown 
to him, while other influences we have men- 
tioned were, perhaps, more active if more 
superficial in their effect. 

He only remained one year at Andover, 
but his affection was sufficient to make him 
write an account of a visit which he paid his 
old school late in life, where he says, 

" The ghost of a boy was at my side as I 
wandered among the places he knew so well. 
I went to the front of the house, there was the 
great rock showing its broad back, — ' I used 
to crack nuts on that/ whispered the small 
ghost. I looked in at the upper window, — 
' I looked out of that on four changing seasons/ 
said the ghost." 

Philip's Academy at Andover^ was only 
the stepping-stone to the University, but the 



The Beginning of Things. 19 

friendship he formed with Phineas Barnes 
while there, and which he retained during 
his whole life, is valuable to us as it led to a 
correspondence which affords us the little 
information we have about Dr. Holmes in his 
undergraduate days. 

He entered Harvard in 1825, an d graduated 
in 1829, thus becoming a member of the famous 
class of '29, which included so many remarkable 
men — B. R. Curtis, George T. Bigelow, and, 
above all, James Freeman Clark. 

Class patriotism was a ruling prejudice of 
the day. The opinion of the class on public 
matters was important to its members, and the 
well-being of each member was a matter 
of concern to all the others, even long after 
they had gone their various ways in the world. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes was loyal to his 
class all his life. It was a delight and a source 
of pride that he was a member of so distin- 
guished a body. He attended the annual 
festivals and read his poems on those occasions 
during a long number of years, and he lingered 
on to that time when the forty or fifty who 
met together in 1829 had dwindled down to 
two or three venerable old men who gathered 
at Dr. Holmes' house for social talk. There 
was " no poem " at these last meetings, but, 
as one of the survivors wrote, " something 
very like tears." 



20 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

The last poem he wrote for his classmates 
was " The Curfew " : — 

The play is over. While the light 
Yet lingers in the darkening hall, 

I come to say a last Good-night 
Before the final — Exeunt all ! 

So ends " The Boys " — a life-long play. 

We too must hear the Prompter's call 
To fairer scenes and brighter day. 

Farewell ! I let the curtain fall ! 

What we know of his life at Harvard is 
gathered chiefly from his letters to Phineas 
Barnes, and the most notable thing about the 
correspondence is that he was always behind- 
hand with it, and always ready with an apology 
for his desultory habits. Probably he in his 
new sphere, like Dorothy Temple in London, 
always found something going to keep him 
idle. 

He gives in one or two letters to his friend 
a circumstantial account of his appearance 
at this time. He bids him not to expect to 
find him a bearded son of Anak, but a short 
youth with a smooth face, standing five feet 
three inches when helpfully shod ; he wears 
his " gills " erect, dresses his hair with attention, 
and buttons his coat a little tighter than hereto- 
fore. In addition he has acquired a bass 
voice ; smokes devoutly ; writes and even 



The Beginning of Things. 21 

publishes poetry ; and, above all, has given 
up talking sentiment. But, with all these 
alterations and accomplishments he genially 
admits that there is one thing lacking — perhaps 
more — he still looks between a man and a 
boy. 

This brief sketch he gives us, and the letters 
to Phineas Barnes at this period indicate that 
he went the way of all flesh when the somewhat 
rigid restraints of home were exchanged for 
the life of a College — he enjoyed his indepen- 
dence, and College suppers, and indulged his 
vanity a little. What does surprise us is that 
he wrote patronisingly to his friend, and took 
himself rather seriously in a sense that we 
should hardly expect in one who developed 
such a rare gift of humour. 

There was nothing in his College life that 
we gather from these letters to suggest that 
his fellows regarded him as a marked man, 
or that he felt himself peculiarly endowed. 
He was chosen Class Poet over the head of 
James Freeman Clark, who became his most 
attached friend, but few of Oliver Wendell 
Holmes' early poems are remarkable in any 
degree, and he himself was critic enough in later 
years to forbid their republication. 

College life was like a new world to him. 
In his Autobiographical Notes he says, " It 
was a great change from the sober habits of 



22 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

a quiet clergyman's family to the festive indul- 
gences and gay licence of a convivial club." 

" The supper-table and the theatre seemed 
lively as compared with Saurin's sermons and 
the Assembly's Catechism/' and this other 
extract is interesting and indicates what a great 
change has come over our opinion with regard 
to the use of alcoholic stimulants : — 

" I remember on the occasion of my having 
an exhibition that, with the consent of my 
parents, I laid in a considerable stock [of wine], 
and that my room was for several days the 
seat of continuous revelry." 

But the change in his manner of living is 
not the most important consideration in speak- 
ing of his University days. Oliver Wendell 
Holmes was not the kind of youth to lose his 
head and waste his time because a little more 
freedom and a little more money was allowed 
him than heretofore. " I have been growing 
a little in body, and, I hope, in mind ; I have 
been learning a little of almost everything, 
and a good deal of some things," — he writes 
to his friend, and he was subject to influences 
that were to affect his whole outlook in certain 
directions, and particularly to those influences 
which were beginning to turn the tide against 
Calvinistic orthodoxy. He was always a 
reverent and a religious man, and his later 
writings are full of discussions on religious 



The Beginning of Things. 23 

questions, but it was at Harvard that his 
religious views first began to take independent 
shape, and he began to get out of the " old 
harness/' as he says. 

After graduating in 1829 he had still to 
choose a profession, and seemed to have no 
very decided preference in the matter. Author- 
ship, Medicine and Law all engaged his attention. 
Authorship he had tried while at Harvard, 
and had even had his first attack of what he 
calls " author's lead-poisoning," but he did 
not seriously contemplate the profession as one 
for himself to choose as the means of earning 
a living. He writes to his friend, — " I am 
totally undecided what to study. It will be the 
Law or Physic, for I cannot say that I think 
the trade of authorship quite adapted to this 
meridian," and in the end he chose Law, or 
rather coquetted with it for a year, entering 
the Dane School, and studying under Mr. 
Ashmun and Judge Story, but his attempts 
to digest Blackstone and Chitty were very 
perfunctory, and the writing of poetry was 
a great hindrance to the study of the Law, 
so that at the end of his experimental year 
he abandoned the profession without regret, 
and with but a poor opinion of it, for he writes 
again to his friend, — " If you would wax thin 
and savage like a half-fed spider, be a lawyer," 
and in the " Professor " he says, — 



24 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

" The business of a lawyer is as unsym- 
pathetic as Jack Ketch's. There is nothing 
humanising in their relation with their fellow- 
creatures. They go for the side that retains 

them." 

This year, which seems so much like one 
thrown away, was really memorable. Oliver 
Wendell Holmes, like so many men of genius, 
took some time to find the high road, but while 
he wandered somewhat aimlessly down side 
tracks, he acquired much that was useful to 
him afterwards. We can distinctly trace the 
lucid quality of the style of his medical essays 
to his readings in law books, and we can discern 
that this " experimental year " afforded the 
leisure which is necessary for vague poetic 
impulse to become a vital endowment. He 
wrote many poems which the College Magazine 
gladly received, and he wrote three ringing 
stanzas which made his name famous. 

In the White Chamber of the old " gambrel- 
roofed " house, during a vacation of this year, 
his patriotism, his conservative instincts, and 
his poetic nature were stirred to intense feeling 
by reading the newspaper paragraphs which 
told of the proposed destruction of the " Con- 
stitution " of historic memory, and he wrote 
the impromptu verses called " Old Ironsides," 
with their fierce and almost challenging 
resonance : — 



The Beginning of Things. 25 

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down ! 

Long has it waved on high, 
And many an eye has danced to see 

That banner in the sky : 
Beneath it rung the battle shout, 

And burst the cannon's roar ; — 
The meteor of the ocean air 

Shall sweep the clouds no more ! 

Her deck, once red with heroes' blood, 

Where knelt the vanquished foe, 
When winds were hurrying o'er the flood, 

And waves were white below, 
No more shall feel the victor's tread, 

Or know the conquered knee ; — 
The harpies of the shore shall pluck 

The eagle of the sea. 

O better that her shattered hulk 

Should sink beneath the wave ; 
Her thunders shook the mighty deep, 

And there should be her grave ; 
Nail to the mast her holy flag, 

Set every threadbare sail, 
And give her to the God of storms, 

The lightning and the gale ! 

The poem was sent to the Daily Advertiser, 
of Boston, and literally flew from paper to 
paper, and was read and recited and circulated 
everywhere. Public opinion grew so strong 
that the Secretary spared the old " Consti- 
tution/ ' and the stanzas that had awakened 
indignation in the people made them aware 
of a new name in American literature. 



26 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

But literature was not to absorb his attention 
yet, and in fact, for the next two or three 
years his interest in literature seems almost 
to have died, or to have been thrust aside as 
a stumbling-block in the midst of his path. 
He relinquished the study of the Law without 
regret, but he turned to Medicine with some 
misgiving. 

" I never could tell," he says, " why I left 
Law for Medicine," but his year at the former 
profession apprised him of the fact that he had 
not even got upon the road, and any change 
was desirable that afforded the slightest possi- 
bility of his so doing. 

He was twenty-one at this time, and soon 
found that in making the change he had obeyed 
an authentic intuition, and was able to devote 
himself with ardour to the pursuit of his studies. 
He writes to his friend Barnes to inform him 
of his altered plans, — " I must announce to 
you the startling position that I have been 
a medical student for more than six months, 
and am sitting with Wistar's ' Anatomy ' beneath 
my quiescent arm, with a stethoscope on my 
desk, and the blood-stained implements of my 
ungracious profession around me. I know 
I might have made an indifferent lawyer. 
I think I may make a tolerable physician. 
And so you must know that for the last several 
months I have been quietly occupying a room 



The Beginning of Things. 27 

in Boston, attending medical lectures, going 
to the Massachusetts Hospital, and slicing and 
slivering the carcases of better men and women 
than I ever was myself, or am like to be." 

He could write in this somewhat over- 
buoyant manner after he had been six months 
at his new work, but his first impressions were 
very depressing. Anaesthetics were not dis- 
covered in 1830, and the sights he witnessed 
in the operating theatre came as a shock to 
his sensitive nature, and produced a feeling of 
awe-stricken sympathy, as did the faces of the 
sick people in the long rows of beds at the 
Hospital. After the first paralysing sight of 
these things he found himself more inclined 
to " talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs/' 
and to moralise upon mortality rather than 
study osteology. He always had the preacher's 
instinct, although he never mounted the pulpit. 

Dr. Holmes was fortunate in his first professor, 
for under Dr. Jackson he entered into a fine 
conception of the doctor's province. This 
" wise and good man " reminds us of that 
fifteenth century surgeon who used to say, " I 
dressed him, and God cured him/' for he 
considered the doctor's first and most important 
function was to take care of his patient, and 
gave this as his interpretation of the much- 
abused phrase, " curing a patient." u Nature 
heals and art helps by removing hindrances 



28 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

if she can, and by putting none in the way if 
she cannot be more positively helpful/ ' 

Writing more than fifty years after, Dr. 
Holmes says, " I never said, ' I will cure ; 
or can cure ; or would, or could, or had cured 
any disease/ My venerated instructor, Dr. 
James Jackson, taught me never to use that 
expression/ " 



CHAPTER II. 

STUDENT DAYS IN EUROPE. 

If I had my own way, I own I would never return 
until I could go home with the confidence of placing 
myself at once at the head of the younger part of the 
profession. 

Letters of O.W.H. 

A FTER spending a few months, and attend- 
^*- ing two courses of lectures at Dr. 
Jackson's private school of medicine, arrange- 
ments were made for his travelling to Europe, 
and pursuing his studies in Paris under the 
famous men who were teaching there at that 
time. 

His father's income was wholly inadequate 
to allow of his son's following this plan, but his 
mother fortunately came from a well-to-do 
family, and had money of her own, which made 
the project feasible, and in March, 1823, he set 
off for New York to join the Philadelphia, which 
was to take him to Europe. 

While waiting at New York he fell in with 
a party of Bostonians, who made the journey 

29 



30 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

pleasant to him, despite the stormy weather 
and his sea-sickness. The passage took twenty- 
three days, and on April 26th he landed at 
Portsmouth. 

The rough weather which his ship encoun- 
tered prevented him crossing the Channel 
immediately, and he tells of how he took the 
opportunity afforded by this delay to visit 
Salisbury Cathedral ; to hear a benediction 
from the lips of a Lord Bishop who received 
£18,000 a year ; to make a pilgrimage " in a 
fly " to Stonehenge ; and to pay a visit in 
company with some other Americans, who 
passed themselves off as Englishmen, to the 
dockyards at Portsmouth. But, calmer weather 
supervening, the danger of the Channel passage 
was no longer an excuse for holiday making, 
and Holmes, with other students, journeyed 
to Havre, and thence to Paris. 

For several reasons we get no very interesting 
account of student life in Paris from Oliver 
Wendell Holmes. He lived chiefly with other 
students from his own country, who were 
studying there at the same time, and he speedily 
became absorbed in his profession, which 
saved him from the fascination of the life 
that is depicted in Murger's " Vie de Boheme." 

His interest in his studies was perhaps a 
sufficient argument for work, but in Paris he 
first woke up to the fact that he was a man, 



Student Days in Europe. 31 

with his own way to make in the world, and he 
applied himself with ambition, and with much 
more vigour than he had shown at Harvard. 
From a letter to his brother we can judge that 
he had settled down to take life seriously, 
and was determined to use his opportunities. 
" When a body has got to your age he should 
give up all his idle fancies, and apply himself 
to some practical use — pleasantly, if he can ; 
odiously, if he must. . . . But just put 
off the age of action a little too long, and 
there is a great chance that you evaporate 
into ' general knowledge/ " Wise advice, 
which he was putting into practice in his own 
case. 

In Paris his attention was devoted almost 
wholly to his work. He rose early in the morn- 
ing ; attended at the Hospital of La Pitie for 
lecture and dissection at 7.30 a.m. ; break- 
fast came somewhere between 10 a.m. and 
11 a.m., and after breakfast he gave himself 
up to study either at the hospital or at home, 
until the evening. 

The evenings were given up largely to dinner 
and recreation. There were other Bostonians 
studying at Paris, and, together with them, 
he took his dinner in some cafe, and soon learned 
to speak French, to eat French, and to drink 
French, and, probably, to criticise the English, 
for he says, in a letter home, 



32 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

" The only really disagreeable people one 
meets are generally Englishmen/ ' and again, 
later on, when he went to London, " I have 
been at different hospitals, looking at different 
manifestations of English quackery/' but he 
happily had occasion in later life to change 
his opinions. 

Besides these dinners, which were a real 
recreation to him, and of which he speaks with 
relish, he had other amusements. Occa- 
sionally he went to the theatre, and, more 
frequently, to hear the famous singers of the 
day, but the chief delight of his leisure hours 
was seemly loafing, and no doubt this occu- 
pation afforded him a better opportunity of 
really seeing and understanding the strangers 
among whom he was living, than the conven- 
tional means. 

He watched for the priest, the horse, and the 
soldier, which tradition said were always to 
be seen on the Pont Neuf ; he turned over 
the second-hand books that w r ere offered for 
sale on the walls of the Quais ; he ransacked 
the small dealers' shops, and hunted for old 
prints and, in fact, became something of a 
connoisseur in this line. 

He visited, of course, the famous show places, 
and found himself in love most of all with the 
Louvre, but what he regretted later, and we 
regret to this day, is that he saw no occasion, 



Student Days in Europe. 33 

and made no opportunity to visit the famous 
people he might have done. 

It is strange that he had no conception at 
this time of what a large place literature would 
demand in his life, and he himself tells us, that, 
had he known, he would have gone lion-hunting 
a little, and tried to see Thiers and Victor 
Hugo, Beranger and Georges Sand, Balzac and 
others. Perhaps it is better he did not, after 
all, for like so many other clever young men, 
he might have got swallowed up or mauled. 

If he failed to go lion-hunting in the approved 
manner, he attended a very curious exhibition 
which is worth mentioning, because it seems 
so strange and remote to us to-day, — 

11 I took a box one day at the Combats des 
Animaux, which takes place twice a week 
just in the outskirts of the city. A great 
number of bull-dogs fought with each other 
in succession, each pair fighting until one was 
killed or fairly beaten. Then a wolf was tied 
to a post and worried . . . and so on with 
other animals as victims, to make a sport and 
spectacle for a very unfeeling audience/ ' The 
letter which contains this account is cut short 
to catch the mail, so that we miss the author's 
comment, but we cannot imagine that the 
entertainment was to his liking. 

On the whole his time was chiefly absorbed 
in professional work, and we are chiefly inter- 



34 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

ested in him as a student. The following 
extracts give a good idea of the keen way in 
which he set to work : — 

" It is true enough that I am avaricious 
of my time, because I want to learn more 

than knows, and beat out and out 

in the nice scientific touches. I am as usual 
all medicine ; getting up at seven and going 
to hospitals ; cutting up ; hearing lectures ; 
soaking, infiltrating in the springs of knowledge. 
There is a great deal more to be done than I 
was inclined to suppose, but the more the 
better, when one gets into good working trim. 
I suppose, of course you wonder in looking 
over my meagre letters not to find them full 
of Parisian talk, and gardens, and statues, 
and such like, but to tell the plain truth I see 
no more and hear no more of these things 
than you do," and this extract from a letter 
to a friend who asks him to become a contri- 
butor to his paper is doubly interesting, as 
indicating how far back in his mind literature 
had been pushed by his other studies : — 

A year and a half in the midst of circumstances which 
are very favourable to some faculties of the mind have 
weaned me from some of my old habits (literary) .... 
The nature of the studies I am pursuing, the singular 
advantages I am at present enjoying . . . have 
forced me to forbid myself any diversion from the path 
of my professional studies. . . Nearly five hours 
in the day I pass at the bedside of patients, . . . 






Student Days in Europe. 35 

and I have always a hundred patients under my eye. 
. . . You may suppose then that if I can devote 
three or four hours every day to my books . 
the electricity for that day is pretty well drawn off. 
. . . No, John, a heavier burden from my own 
science if you will, but not another hair from the locks 
of Poesy, or it will be indeed an ass's back that is broken. 
I am not ashamed of the ambition of being distin- 
guished in my profession, but more than that, I have 
become attached to the study of truth by habits formed 
in severe and sometimes painful self-denial. 

In truth, Oliver Wendell Holmes fairly 
plunged into his work in Paris. Always acute 
and observant, and anxious to learn, he drank 
in knowledge from all who were able and willing 
to give it. There was Lisfranc, well known to 
English students, as his name is associated 
with the tubercle on the first rib, a fact which 
they are required to remember. Holmes 
followed him as he went the round of his 
patients, and watched him when he operated 
— a strange man who loved to bleed his patients 
and regretted the guardsmen of the Empire, 
" because they had such splendid thighs to 
amputate/ ' 

He went round the Hotel des Invalides 
with ruddy-faced and white-aproned Larrey, 
Napoleon's favourite surgeon, and the most 
honest man he had ever known. "To go 
round the Hotel des Invalides with Larrey 
was to live again the campaigns of Napoleon, 



36 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

to look on the sun of Austerlitz, to hear the 
cannons of Marengo, to shiver in the snows of 
the Russian retreat/' 

Then there was Velpeau, who seemed to 
him more capable of wielding the sledge- 
hammer than handling the lancet. But, 
unchallenged among all the surgeons was 
Dupuytren, whose name carries us so far 
back when we remember he was one of the 
last to see a child touched for the King's Evil. 
" He marched through the wards of the Hotel 
Dieu like a lesser kind of deity . . . soft- 
spoken, undemonstrative." 

Girt with his apron he went from bed to bed, 
followed by a crowd of students, among whom 
Oliver Wendell Holmes figured, and when he 
stopped before a bed and leaned over to 
examine a patient the students " piled " up on 
his back, to see and hear, and he would " shake 
them off like so many rats and mice." 

Boyer, Ricord, Broussais, — he attended 
them all, except perhaps the last mentioned, 
who lectured to empty benches for the most 
part, and whose conclusion was interrupted 
by the door banging, and students crowding in 
to hear the eloquent Andral, who lectured 
immediately after him. 

There were other famous surgeons and 
physicians in Paris at this time whom we need 
not mention, but we have still to refer to the 



Student Days in Europe. 37 

most notable one among them all, — one who 
influenced Dr. Holmes in a remarkable degree. 

At Harvard, as was mentioned, class 
patriotism was the fashion, but in Paris among 
the students keen and often bitter partisanship 
was the order of the day. The students were 
at liberty to choose their own professors and 
lecturers, and to follow their own preference 
with regard to the surgeons they attended. 
They fell in love with their favourites as girls 
do with their Sunday School teachers, and 
supported them with the tongue and with 
heavier argument, so that Holmes was reminded 
of the Middle Ages, when each baron had his 
following ready to feud on his behalf. He 
speedily attached himself to the famous Louis, 
who was worshipped by the students of that 
day, and is not forgotten by those of our own 
time. He was regarded as the first teacher 
in Paris, and in addition to the rare gift of the 
instructor of youth, he was able to awaken 
the students, and to fire them with a generous 
ambition. 

Dr. Holmes says of him, that he was of 
" serene and grave aspect,' ' and again, " he 
was modest in the presence of nature, and 
fearless in the face of authority — unwavering 
in the pursuit of truth/ ' 

His fault was that his personality so domi- 
nated the students that they gave themselves 



38 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

up entirely to his teaching, and were apt to 
regard sneeringly that of other men. 

Dr. Holmes recognised this in later life, 
and admitted that sometimes he could have 
been better employed than in sitting at the 
feet of Louis, or following out on his own 
behalf the teaching he had received from him. 
Nevertheless, he was a great man, and a 
great teacher, and had a greater influence 
upon Dr. Holmes' professional life than any 
other. 

At the close of his first year in Paris he 
writes an account of his stewardship to his 
parents before setting out for a tour in the 
Low Countries. 

I have spent a year — within a few weeks — in Paris. 
In that time my expenses have been 7,000 francs — 
that is to say, about as much as those of my companions. 
I have lived comfortably, liberally if you please, but 
in the main not extravagantly. I have employed my 
time with a diligence that leaves no regrets. My aim 
has been to qualify myself, so far as my faculties would 
allow me, not for a mere scholar, for a follower of other 
men's opinions, for a dependent on their authority, but 
for the character of a man who has seen, and therefore 
knows : who has thought and therefore has arrived 
at his own conclusions. I have lived with a great and 
glorious people. I have thrown my thoughts into a new 
language. I have received the shock of new minds 
and new habits. ... I hope you do not think 
your money wasted. For my own part I am perfectly 
certain that I might have lived until I was grey without 



Student Days in Europe. 39 

acquiring the experience I have gained, and hope still 
further to improve by changing the scene of my life and 
studies. 

There is obviously a great difference between 
the character of this letter and that of his 
communications to Phineas Barnes when he 
was at Harvard. Oliver Wendell Holmes had 
developed immensely during his year in Paris, 
and although there is little at present that 
suggests the genial humour and rare sympathy 
of the " Autocrat/' yet we recognise a serious 
mind at work, and one of an independent 
stamp. 

After dispatching this satisfactory report 
of his year's progress he felt at liberty to enjoy 
the vacation, and set off, with some friends, 
for a trip down the Rhine, to be followed by 
a tour in the Low Countries. After this they 
crossed to England, where he found the tomb 
of an ancestor in Westminster Abbey, and paid 
twopence to the " banditti " who demanded 
this fee from those who would see over St. 
Paul's. There is humour and criticism in his 
letters from London as there often was in those 
he sent from Paris, but the humour is a little 
acrid, and we miss the charity which a little 
later would have left out many things, not 
from fear of what his parents might have 
thought of his opinions, but from a desire not 
to hurt their feelings. 



40 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

He stayed some weeks in London, lamenting 
the " austere " Sunday which contrasted so 
strikingly with the Parisian celebration of that 
day. In fact his life in Paris worked with the 
influences at Harvard, and with Scott's Bible 
to make him not only unsympathetic with the 
Puritan Sabbath, but with Calvinistic ortho- 
doxy, and it was not till years later that he 
was able to take up many things that he had 
thrown down in his youth, and make them his 
own in a new and touching way. 

The chief value of his stay in London was 
the opportunity afforded him of visiting the 
London hospitals, of seeing the London surgeons 
operate, and learning something of the English 
practice and interpretations of medical and 
surgical science. His opinion of Englishmen 
and things English remained on the whole 
unimproved, as many of his letters suggest, 
and it was not until his second visit to Europe 
in 1886 that he was able to speak with real 
cordiality of the mother country. 

His sketch of Edward Irving, who was 
famous at this time, and whom he heard preach, 
is worth giving, if only to show how far he had 
to travel before he could arrive at that equally 
effective and humorous, but much more 
charitable style by which we know him. 

He is a black, savage, saturnine, long-haired Scotch- 
man, with a most Tyburn -loo king squint to him. He 



Student Days in Europe. 41 

said nothing remarkable that I remember. Mr. Irving 
and his flock have given up the unknown tongue, and 
confine themselves to rolling up their eyes so as to show 
the whites in a formidable manner. 

This sketch of Irving is only interesting 
for the reason that has been given above, for 
it is not even a good caricature. 

After a few weeks in London, learning, and 
admiring, and abusing, he made a trip to Scot- 
land, thence back to the English Lakes, and 
homeward to Dover. During this part of his 
tour he couldn't resist the temptation to indulge 
in a ride in the train which had recently begun 
to run between Liverpool and Manchester, and 
which was an expensive way of travelling then, 
but the compensation of travelling thirty-two 
miles in an hour and a half was something to 
be taken into account, and the speed astonished 
Oliver Wendell Holmes : — 

I arrived in Manchester intending to go straight 
to London, but the idea of the railway was so tempting 
that I ordered a hasty dinner, clapped my luggage and 
myself upon one of the steam carriages, and was in 
Liverpool in an hour and a half, having gone considerably 
more than twenty miles an hour, and not making a very 
short passage either, for they have been the whole 
distance (thirty-two to thirty-four miles) in an hour. 

After this extravagance he continued his 
way by coach, assuring his people that he 
always rode outside, which was cheaper and 
more pleasant. 



42 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

About the end of July, 1834, h e returned to 
Paris by the Dover-Calais route, and paid a 
visit on his way to the Inn at Calais which 
Sterne has made memorable in his " Sentimental 
Journey/' The letter containing his descrip- 
tion of the environs of Paris is almost lyric 
in parts. He was delighted to get back, and 
his tour had served, among other things, to 
whet his appetite for work, and his love for 
the French capital. He looked forward to 
another year of work with all the advantages 
it meant. Louis had shown him great favour 
by allowing him the freedom of his wards. 
He had been elected to a Medical Society of 
Observation, that would bring him in touch 
with some of the most intelligent young French- 
men. He had opportunities at Paris to learn 
operating as it could be learned nowhere else 
at that time, and with all this in view he received 
a letter from home that suggested a curtail- 
ment of his study and the Italian tour with 
which he hoped to round his course, on account 
of the purse at home growing lean, and perhaps 
because his parents were made anxious by the 
disturbed state of Paris at that time. 

He pleaded his cause with energy. " As 
for abridging my stay in Paris, a few reasons 
will soon convince you in that matter/' and 
he proceeds to give his parents an account of 
his advantages and opportunities which have 



Student Days in Europe. 43 

been enumerated above. A little later he wrote 
again in the same strain, and these letters 
show how wonderfully keen and absorbed 
he had become in his profession, almost to 
the point of making him selfish and careless 
of his parents' feelings, it would occasionally 
seem. 

I say nothing about coming home. ... If I had 
my own way, I own I would never return until I could 
go home with the confidence of placing myself at once 
at the head of the younger part of the profession. 

And in another letter he writes : — 

I have received no new letter from you since the one 
in which you spoke of my coming home sooner than I 
had expected. Since that letter one of the ideas that 
troubled your imagination — that of war — is removed. 
. . . And in the meantime I cannot give you an idea 
of the zeal and profit with which I have been applying 
myself to certain branches which I had hitherto neglected. 
Among other things I have turned my attention to 
operating, and in the course of a few weeks I have become 
an expert and rapid operator. 

It is not certain that his letters convinced 
his parents, but at all events he completed 
his course, and fulfilled his desire for an Italian 
tour before returning to Boston to commence 
the practice of his profession. The time he 
spent in Paris, besides giving him the freedom 
of another language and the larger outlook 
which is almost always the result of being 
in a foreign land and among a strange people, 



44 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

had made him as familiar with disease as a 
keeper of a menagerie is with the " wild beasts 
he feeds and handles." He was thoroughly 
equipped as a physician, not only because 
he had applied himself to study, but because 
he had had experience, as he writes : — 

If I was asked, " Why do you prefer that intelligent 
young man to this venerable practitioner ? " . . . 
I should say, " because the young man has experience.' ' 
. . . True experience is the product of opportunity 
multiplied by years. . . . But merely to have 
breathed a concentrated scientific atmosphere like that 
of Paris must have an effect on any one who has lived 
where stupidity is tolerated. ... I have more 
fully learned at least the principles since I have been in 
Paris, — not to take authority where I can have facts ; 
not to guess when I can know ; not to think a man must 
take physic because he is sick. 

It was his study in Paris that taught him 
to hate half-truths and green knowledge, 
against which he carried on a crusade in 
later life, but it had also taught him to forget 
literature for the time being. 

" I have entirely relinquished the business 
of writing for journals, and shall say ' No,' 
though Minerva and Plutus come hand in 
hand to tear me, the Cincinnatus of Science, 
from the plough-tail she has commanded me 
to follow." 

He reminds himself of the author of " The 
Seasons," when he writes his letter home in 



Student Days in Europe. 45 

bed, and there is casual reference in his corres- 
pondence to Goldsmith, Coleridge, Sterne, 
— but nothing more. His mind, however, had 
absorbed many impressions that were to 
mature and be reproduced later on, but years 
were to pass before the fruits of his mind were 
ripe. In the meantime he sends his micro- 
scope (an unusual part of a practitioner's 
equipment in those days, and indicative of his 
thorough conception of his calling) and two 
skeletons home, and sets off for the conventional 
grand tour in Italy. 



CHAPTER III. 

DOCTOR AND PROFESSOR. 

" A man can see further, sir/' he said one day, " from 
the top of Boston State House, and see more that is 
worth seeing, than from all the pyramids and turrets 
and steeples in all the places in the world ! . 
Yes, sir, and there are great truths . . . that people 
are looking for from the tops of these hills of ours." 

— The Professor. 

'"TOWARDS the end of 1835 Oliver Wendell 
A Holmes left Europe for America, never 
to return until half a century had elapsed, 
when, in company with his daughter, he made 
the tour which he describes in " A Hundred 
Days/' During this long interval he lived 
in Boston or Cambridge, scarcely stirring off 
his own hearthrug, as he says, and through 
his personality, his public-spirited interest 
in affairs, and above all, his literary work, 
he did more than anyone else to make Boston 
famous. 

When he returned to Boston to commence 
practice in 1836 — " delighted to see my own 
country once again " — he was a young man, 
twenty-seven years of age, of conservative 

46 



1 



Doctor and Professor. 47 

and aristocratic instincts, of buoyant spirit, 
and of keen and alert mind, " bubbling over 
with humour, and sparkling with coruscations 
of his own peculiar genius/ ' 

We have hardly a glimpse of the " Autocrat " 
during these years, as he himself had no vision, 
and no desire for literary fame. He had come 
from Europe with dreams of distinguishing 
himself in his profession, and he was well 
equipped by knowledge and experience to suc- 
ceed in general practice, through but poorly 
seconded by his peculiarly sensitive tempera- 
ment and hindered perhaps by that quality 
of mind which urged him to dip in many books 
rather than read through one. 

If youth and high hopes are destiny enough, 
he would have had nothing to fear, but even 
these priceless assets are not all that one 
requires in order to build a large practice. 

Dr. Holmes never did have a brilliant career 
as a general practitioner, and the story goes 
that once, when asked to divide his practice, 
he replied with regret that he was unable to 
entertain the idea, as he had only one patient. 

There are many reasons that account for 
his moderate success as a physician. He 
never exerted himself " to make business/' 
as he said, but what hindered him chiefly was 
that folk held to the opinion then, as they do 
now, that the man who made a joke as the 



48 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

front door was opened to him, and laughed 
while climbing the stairs, could not possibly 
compose himself to a seemly gravity before 
entering the sick room, and was a very unlikely 
man to rightly appreciate the serious condition 
of his patient. 

Aware as he was of this opinion, he could 
never hinder himself from seeing a joke, and 
even laughing heartily at it, and he preferred 
to check his income rather than his spirits, 
as frequent references in his writings indicate : — 

It's a vastly pleasing prospect when you're screwing 

out a laugh, 
That your very next year's income is diminished by a 

half. 

This buoyancy, and the sin of writing poetry, 
no doubt hindered some folk, who liked him 
well enough as a man, from engaging his 
services as a physician, as possibly the greater 
genius of Oliver Goldsmith as wit and poet 
operated in a larger measure against his success 
in a similar direction, though it must be con- 
fessed poor Noll's qualifications were of the 
scantiest, and one would prefer a prescription 
written by any spectacled apothecary to one 
drafted by him. 

It is most probable that the foregoing reasons 
had little enough to do with the fact that Dr. 
Holmes was not so popular at the bedside 
as we could wish to find him, and the real 



Doctor and Professor. 49 

reason was that the sick patient never was his 
subject, and he was marked out for that other 
branch of his profession in which he achieved 
distinction later on. 

He certainly was a careful physician, and 
did his utmost for his patients, but he was not 
in love with general practice. He could never 
become indifferent to the painful scenes in the 
sick room, and valued such practice chiefly 
because he was compelled to keep a horse 
and chaise, which he drove to the immense 
risk of himself and his neighbour ; and although 
he intimated that the slightest " fevers " were 
acceptable, he lost no time in making himself 
known in his profession as a writer, which no 
doubt helped him to those appointments which 
enabled him, eventually, to relinquish private 
practice. 

In the year that he returned from Europe 
and established himself in practice, he obtained 
what professional prestige was attached to 
joining the Massachusetts Medical Society, 
and during this and the following year he won 
distinction in his profession by carrying off 
three prizes for medical essays. He writes : — 

The Boylston Prize was almost unanimously awarded 
to my dissertation. It is somewhat pleasant to have 
cut out a fifty dollar prize under the guns of two old 
blazers who have each of them swamped their competitors 
in preceding trials. 



5o Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

These papers he included in a volume pub- 
lished under the title " Medical Essays " at a 
later period. Of these the essay on " Inter- 
mittent Fever in New England" was the 
valuable result of laborious work, and is still 
worth reading by those interested in the 
subject. 

These essays need not be avoided by lay 
readers on account of the title of the book that 
contains them, as they are brimful of wit 
and make racy reading, and, if he happen to be 
incredulous of the value of " one-millionth-of-a- 
grain doses," the essay on Homoeopathy may be 
recommended to him, as Dr. Homes hated this 
pseudo-science almost as well as he hated 
Calvinism. 

In addition to fairly starting practice and 
writing his medical essays, between 1836-1838 
he attended the Massachusetts General Hospital 
as one of the physicians until, in the latter 
year, he was appointed, to his great pleasure, 
Professor of Anatomy at Dartmouth College, 
which chair he retained until 1840. 

These early years of practice were noticeable 
apart from his medical work. He had the 
honour of being asked to read a poem at the 
Phi Beta Kappa Society, and he delivered 
on that occasion a metrical essay, " which 
presents," as he says, " the simple and partial 
views of a young person trained after the school 



Doctor and Professor. 51 

of classical English verse, as represented by- 
Pope, Goldsmith and Campbell, with whose 
lines his memory was well stocked/ ' 

The year 1836 is noticed with pleasure, as 
during that year he renewed his allegiance to 
literature, — which he had forsworn when he 
went to Europe, — by publishing his first volumes 
of poetry, which contained, among others, 
the metrical essay, " Old Ironsides/' and 
"The Last Leaf," which will be discussed later 
on. 

In 1837, his father, Abiel Holmes, died at the 
ripe age of seventy, and the loss of his father 
made him desirous of making a home for himself. 
At all events his jnind soon turned in this 
direction, and we find him writing to his friend 
Barnes to this effect : — 

And so you are married. I wish I were, too. I have 
flirted and written poetry long enough, and I feel I am 
growing domestic and tabby-ish, . . . and it is by 
no means impossible that another summer or so may see 
my name among the hymeneal victims. ... I do 
indeed congratulate you on changing your isolated 
condition into the beatific state of duality. The very 
moment one feels that he is falling into the old age of 
youth — which I take to be from twenty-five to thirty, 
in most cases — he must not dally any longer. 

Three years after his father's death, Dr. 
Holmes married Amelia Lee Jackson, the 
daughter of Judge Jackson, of the Supreme 
Court of Massachusetts. 



52 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

This lady, who endeared herself to all who 
were privileged to know her, added to personal 
charm a mind and character of rare nobility, 
and brought Dr. Holmes every good he could 
desire except a fortune. She was his comrade 
as well as his wife, and being possessed of 
humour and a sensitive spirit, she was able to 
enter with imaginative sympathy into his dearest 
concerns. 

In her anxiety and determination to shield 
him from that legion of time-stealers and 
temper-stealers who prey upon men of growing 
reputation, she made great personal sacrifices, 
but, as Mr. Morse says, with " such grace and 
cheerfulness that they might well pass un- 
noticed/ ' and would have rejoiced the heart 
of Robert Louis Stevenson, who grieved that 
sacrifice was so often brutalising, and that men 
and women were so often able, from a shocking 
sense of duty, to cut off their members, and 
willing, after all, to lose their reward and 
wander gloomily through the world seeking 
the lost members. 

Dr. Holmes had three children, the first — 
a boy — who bore his father's name, and dis- 
tinguished himself in the Civil War, was the 
occasion of that delightful essay, " My Hunt 
after the Captain/' in which Dr. Holmes tells 
of his anxious journey to the front to find 
his wounded son. This son studied Law 



Doctor and Professor, 53 

afterwards, and during his father's lifetime 
was appointed Associate Justice of the Supreme 
Judicial Court. His brother, who also entered 
the legal profession and was gifted in many 
ways, was dogged by ill-health all his life, and 
died prematurely in 1884. 

The second child — a girl — lived to marry, 
and to accompany her father on his tour in 
Europe, but she, too, predeceased Dr. Holmes. 

When Dr. Holmes married in 1840 he relin- 
quished his Professorship at Dartmouth College, 
bought a house in Montgomery Place, Boston, 
and settled down to practice again with some 
persistency until 1847, when he was appointed 
to the Chair of Anatomy and Physiology at 
Harvard University. 

During these seven years he made himself 
famous, locally, as a wit, a poet, a table-talker, 
and a rarely kindly man, as Lowell wrote in 
his " Fable for Critics " : — 

This Holmes, who is matchless among you for wit, 

• • • • 

Full of fancy, fun, feeling, or spiced with satiric 
In a measure so kindly, you doubt if the toes 
That are trodden upon, are your own or your foes'. 

But it must not be forgotten that Holmes 
was always eminently more than a witty 
man, and that, with our respect and great 
admiration for him as a man of letters, we are 
bound and glad to admit that his single con- 



54 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

tribution to medical science is more worthy 
of remembrance than all his contributions to 
literature. 

In 1843, he announced his discovery of the 
contagiousness of puerperal fever, and was 
confronted by the savage, and even abusive 
opposition of the leading obstetricians in the 
country. 

His attitude during this controversy was 
remarkably fine, and is worthy of mention, 
because with dignity and persistence he main- 
tained his position and made foes, which, to 
a man of his temperament — almost over-anxious 
not to quarrel, not to oppose — must have 
required a stern motive. 

Motive enough he had, for he was pleading 
on " behalf of the women whose lives were at 
stake," and, although he won the victory, 
it was a hard fight against great odds. 

Authority and custom, which " doth make 
dotards of us all," in the persons of the Pro- 
fessors of Philadelphia, foamed with indig- 
nation ; and the medical students, " babes in 
knowledge," as Holmes calls them, " pumping 
away for the milk of truth at all that offers, were 
it nothing better than a Professor's shrivelled 
forefinger," followed their instructors. 

But Dr. Holmes never lost his temper during 
this controversy, and when he republished 
his essay in 1855, he said, " I take no offence, 



Doctor and Professor. 55 

and make no retort. No man makes a quarrel 
with me over the counterpane that covers a 
mother with her new-born infant at her breast." 
And so, when his principle made its way, and 
was fully established, it was with all the more 
pleasure that he had won a great victory over 
prejudice in a great manner — that he could 
say he would be content to have lived, though 
nothing else had come of his life. 

During these early years of practice he wrote 
many poems of differing merit. One was 
addressed to Charles Dickens, who visited 
America in 1842, and was welcomed at Boston. 
Another was read before the Phi Beta Kappa 
Society in the following year. In fact, at the 
request of friend or enemy, he was ready to 
write a poem and make it suitable for reading 
at a birth, death, or marriage. 

In 1846, the year which seems to close a chap- 
ter of his life, he wroted a rhymed lesson to be 
read before the Boston Mercantile Association, 
and the following year, which opened another 
chapter, saw him seated with pride and pleasure 
in the Professor's chair at Harvard. 

He was appointed, in 1847, Parkman Professor 
of Anatomy and Physiology in the Medical 
School of that University, but he applied himself 
and his students to so many subjects while he 
occupied this position that he humorously 
denominated the chair a " settee." His task 



56 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

became so onerous on account of his willingness 
to perform more than was in the bond, that in 
1871, a separate chair in Physiology was estab- 
lished and he remained Professor of Anatomy 
until his resignation in 1882. He lectured 
at Harvard University for many years, and 
obtained such distinction as a lecturer that a 
brief account of him at the time is desirable. 
David Macrae describes him as " A plain little 
dapper man, his short hair brushed down 
like a boy's, but turning gray now ; a trifle of 
frizzy hair under his ears, a powerful jaw and 
a thick, strong underlip, that gives decision 
to his look, with a dash of pertness. In con- 
versation he is animated and cordial, — sharp 
too, taking the words out of one's mouth/ ' 
And Miss Mitford depicts him as " A small, 
compact little man ; the delight and ornament 
of every society he enters ; buzzing about like 
a bee, or fluttering like a humming-bird ; ex- 
ceedingly difficult to catch unless he be really 
wanted for some kind act, and then you are 
sure of him." 

He lectured to a class of three hundred 
students in Anatomy, and was appointed to 
take the last lecture hour of the day, when the 
students were jaded and even nauseated by 
attendance at a series of previous lectures. 
This honour was conferred upon Holmes because 
he was thought to be the most likely man to 



Doctor and Professor. 57 

keep them awake, and he soon proved himself 
equal to that task. 

At one o'clock the students poured into the 
lecture theatre from two doors somewhere 
near the ceiling, for the seats sloped up in tiers 
as they do in a play-house. The lecturer climbed 
a flight of steps that led from the street, and 
entered the room by another door — " a small 
gentle, smiling man," but out of breath, for 
asthma troubled him much at this time. 

When he had recovered himself a little, and 
the somewhat turbulent greetings of his class 
had subsided, he hopped about hunting for 
diagrams, specimens, etc., to illustrate his 
lecture, and then " plunged into his subject," 
which lay before him in the shape of a body 
decorously covered, and dissected in that part 
which constituted the immediate subject of the 
lecture, so that the vessels, nerves and muscles 
were exposed to view. 

He had many qualifications apart from his 
bright and piquant style to make him an ideal 
lecturer in Anatomy. He was accurate before 
all things, and what is absolutely important 
in dealing with this subject, unwearying in his 
attention to detail. 

From Louis he had learned the value, or 
rather the necessity of reiteration, and from 
his own kindly nature he learned to forego 
the pleasure of addressing himself to the clever 



58 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

men of his class, and to speak with the dull 
ones in his mind all the while. 

He was always urgent with himself to teach 
his students a little that they might learn 
thoroughly, and was not anxious, as so many 
lecturers are, to tell them all he knew, much 
of which the majority of his class could not 
appreciate. He hated half-knowledge, with 
which, he said, the American atmosphere 
was vocal, and made every effort during his 
lectureship to make his students discontented 
with it. " There is a rare difference/' he 
used to say, " between green knowledge and 
seasoned knowledge/' 

He loved his class, and his subject, but it 
is characteristic of him that, when asked 
what part of Anatomy he liked best, he replied, 
" The bones : they are cleanest," and it is also 
in keeping with our idea of the man who was 
too sensitive to like the work of a general 
practitioner, that he would run out of his 
lecture-room when a rabbit was to be chloro- 
formed, begging his demonstrator not to let 
it squeak. He never would agree to vivisection, 
perhaps believing with Hyrth, as Mr Morse 
says, " that Nature will tell the truth all the 
better for not being put to the torture." 

If Holmes loved his students, they were 
attached in a rare way to him, and after his 
last lecture to them in 1882, amid deafening 



Doctor and Professor. 59 

applause, he was presented with a loving-cup 
bearing the words, " Love bless thee ; Joy 
crown thee ; God speed thy career/' which so 
moved him that, as he said, " My tongue forgot 
its office, though my heart was in the right 
place." 

During his lectureship in Anatomy he was 
appointed Dean of the Medical School. He 
occupied this position for several years, and 
the Massachusetts Medical Society did him the 
honour of electing him Anniversary Chairman 
in 1852, and Orator in i860. 

A very interesting controversy arose during 
his professorship, and one which has recently 
occupied the attention of our own Medical 
Faculty, viz., the question of the admittance 
of women to the profession. Addressing him- 
self to the " English Annex " over the tea-cups 
years later, Dr. Holmes says, " Lecture to 
students of your sex ? Why not, I should like 
to know ? I don't think it is the calling for 
which the average woman is especially adapted, 
but my teacher got a part of his education 
from a lady, Madame Lachapelle, and I don't 
see why if one can learn from a woman, he may 
not teach a woman, if he knows enough." 

But, though he himself had attended the 
lectures of Madame Lachapelle in Paris, he 
registered his vote against the women, but he 
did so, not because he had any fear as to what 



60 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

would happen to the medical profession if 
they were admitted, but because he felt that 
something might happen to the women. 

He never was a controversialist, and took 
no strong partisan attitude in this contention, 
but some time after the dispute had died down, 
he said : — 

If here and there one intrepid woman insists on taking 
by storm the fortress of medical education, I would have 
the gates flung open to her, as if it were that of the 
citadel of Orleans, and she were Joan of Arc returning 
from the field of victory. 

This attitude of mind, which does credit to his 
kindly nature, does nothing towards solving 
the problem ; the gates must obviously be 
opened to all or none. Dr. Holmes never seems 
to have made up his mind on the subject. He 
thought that women on the whole should stick 
to nursing, and feared that a good nurse would 
only become a poor doctor if admitted to the 
medical profession. On the other hand, he 
says : — 

I am for giving every chance for a good education, 
and if they think Medicine is one of their proper callings, 
let them try it. 

But he goes on to suggest that they should 
specialise, and should always have an expert 
of the other sex at their back — an opinion which 
would receive swift condemnation to-day at 
the hands of women. Perhaps he was afraid 



Doctor and Professor. 61 

they would become herbalists, or worse still, 
homoeopathists, for, he said, " they are so 
imaginative and impressible that they are at 
the mercy of all sorts of fancy systems/' 

One is bound to confess that Dr. Holmes 
contributed nothing to this question. His 
real opinion, if he had one, was that women 
should not be admitted, but his kindly and 
generous nature inclined him to the other side, 
lest he should hurt the feelings of women, and 
seem to stand in their light. His attitude, 
however, gives us an insight into his character, 
and shows us temperamental characteristics 
which were strength and weakness to him. 

When Dr. Holmes resigned his Anatomy 
Class in 1882, he was at once appointed 
Emeritus Professor at Harvard University, 
and in leaving the consideration of him as a 
Professor of Medical Science, we quote Dr. 
Osier's words : — " He will always occupy a 
unique position in the affections of medical 
men, ... as the most successful com- 
bination which the world has ever seen of the 
physician and the man of letters." 

Between 1847 ajQ d 1882 many subjects besides 
Anatomy occupied Dr. Holmes' mind. His 
family was born during these years, and he 
moved his residence first to Charles Street, 
and then to a splendid house in Beacon Street, 
where he lived till the end of his life. He 



62 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

spent the summer months of seven years from 
1847 in Pittsfield, having built a house on a 
small estate that his great-grandfather had 
acquired a century earlier. All his recollections 
seem to cling and linger about these seven 
summers, which stood in his memory like the 
" seven golden candlesticks in the beatific 
vision of the holy dreamer/ ' Even thirty 
years after, he wrote to a friend saying he 
was still loyal to the place. 

He was intensely fond of the country, and 
approached as near to being annoyed as was 
possible with him if it was suggested that he 
was a town man. Pride in his own " Place " 
at Pittsfield, and his good fortune in having 
many notable men for near neighbours, among 
whom were Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman 
Melville, made it a very hard task to leave 
it. 

The expense of a country house was more 
than he could afford, however. The architect, 
following the rule of his profession, erected a 
house to cost twice as much as he had agreed 
upon. Then a barn was wanted, and a horse 
and cart, and perhaps Dr. Holmes' management 
was not economical. However that may be, 
he felt compelled to sell it. With what regret 
he did so the following extracts from letters 
show. Writing years afterwards to J. Sargent, 
he says : — 



Doctor and Professor. 63 

I have never regretted my seven summers passed in 
Pittsfield, and never had the courage, although often 
asked, to visit the place since I left it. I have one 
particularly pleasant remembrance about my place 
— that I, in a certain sense, created it. The trees about 
are all or almost all of my planting. . . . Look at 
them as you pass my old place, and see how much better 
I have deserved the gratitude of posterity than the 
imbecile who only accomplished an extra blade of grass. 

And to an old friend he writes : — 

I can hardly believe it is almost thirty years since I 
bade good-bye to the old place, expecting to return the 
next season. We passed through the gate — under 
the maple which used to stand there ; took a look at the 
house and the great pine that stood, and I hope stands 
in its solitary beauty and grandeur — rode on — passed 
the two bridges, — reached the station — and Good-bye, 
dear old town ! Well, that is the way. 

In 1852, Holmes joined that large body of 
notable men who were touring the country 
and lecturing in the interests of their pockets, 
and — we hope — of truth. 

It is very remarkable that at that time 
the ablest men in literature and science — 
many of them men of genius as Emerson, 
Lowell, Thackeray — devoted a great deal of 
their time to lecturing, and what is perhaps 
more noticeable is that they were never in 
straits to find an audience to listen to them. 
The lecturer finds a very different condition 
of things prevailing to-day, partly because the 



64 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

best men of the day do not lecture as was the 
case in Holmes' day, and partly because that 
spirit which existed in the middle of last century 
in America, and approved of anything of an 
educational character, however dull it might 
be, no longer predominates. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes had no liking for this 
kind of work from the first, but his audiences 
had, and he never wanted for invitations, but 
his opinion of the " remarkably intelligent 
audience " did not improve as he became more 
acquainted with it, as the sketch in the 
" Autocrat " indicates : — 

Front seats, a few old folks — shiny-headed — slant up 
best ear towards the lecturer — drop off asleep after a 
while when the air begins to get a little narcotic with 
carbonic acid. Bright women's faces — young and 
middle-aged . . . (pick out the best and lecture 
mainly to that). . . . Dull faces, here, there, — in 
how many places ! I don't say dull people, but faces 
without a ray of sympathy or a movement of expression. 
They are what kill the lecturer. These negative faces 
with their vacuous eyes and stony lineaments pump 
and suck the warm soul out of him. That is why 
lecturers grow so pale. 

And, in fact, if Holmes had been blessed 
with the most appreciative audience, no amount 
of good treatment they could have offered 
would have compensated a man with such a 
homing instinct as he had, for the misery of 
being away from his friends and fireside. 



Doctor and Professor. 65 

But the audience that gathered in a country 
town to be operated upon offered as little 
attraction to a man of Holmes' quick tempera- 
ment as did the inconvenience of the necessary- 
journey and the frequent discomfort of supper 
and bed at any inn but his own. 

Lowell paid his biting tribute to the misery 
of lecturing in the country, and spoke of being 
received by a solemn committee in a room 
with a stove that smoked and having three 
cold fish tails laid in his hand to shake ; then 
to the " cold lecture-room to read a cold lecture 
to a cold audience/' and back again "to your 
smoke side, and the three fish-tails again," 
and almost everyone who had any experience 
of lecturing in the country at this time confirms 
in his own way this opinion. 

But lecturing in Boston was a much more 
congenial task, and Dr. Holmes delivered his 
most important course on " The English Poets ,J 
to a large and cultured audience in that town. 

Altogether his lecturing experience was 
valuable to him, apart from the fact that it 
enabled him to write that delightful chapter 
in the " Autocrat," for it did something towards 
preparing an audience for that book which 
began to appear in the Atlantic Monthly in 1857. 

The year 1857 is altogether memorable in 
Holmes' life and in the literature of America. 
Until that date, Oliver Wendell Holmes was 



66 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

known chiefly as a medical man, with a local 
reputation and name, as a poet and author. 
He was outside "the charmed circle drawn 
around the scholars and poets of Cambridge 
and Concord/ ' and felt some surprise when 
Lowell, who had been invited to edit a new 
monthly which Messrs. Philips, Sampson & Co. 
proposed to start, made the one condition of 
his acceptance that Holmes should be the first 
contributor to be engaged. 

Lowell's insistance upon this condition did 
not depend upon his friendship for Holmes. 
His insight made him aware of Dr. Holmes' 
genius, and it is due to him that his friend 
was roused from his " literary lethargy," and 
called to active service. 

From this time he became less and less a 
medical man, and more and more a man of 
letters, and the immediate recognition which 
the " Autocrat " won, besides startling the 
author into a better appreciation of his own 
powers, was sufficient stimulus to determine 
the direction of his whole subsequent career. 






CHAPTER IV. 

THE AUTOCRAT. 

No sense is here of loss or lack ; 

Before his sweetness and his light 
The dial holds its shadows back, 

The charmed hours delay their flight. 

His still the keen analysis 

Of men and moods, electric wit, 

Free play of mirth, and tenderness 
To heal the slightest wound from it. 

Whittier : " Our Autocrat." 

TN his letters to his friend Dr. Holmes 
-■- often complained of, or rather regretted, 
the necessities that compelled him to live for 
so many years in one town, and among one set 
of people. He had ambition above a provincial 
career, and felt that the kind of life he was 
living tended to make him " intensely local, 
and doubtless narrow in many ways," and yet 
the success of the " Autocrat " depended to 
a large extent upon its " intensely local " and 
consequently pungent flavour. 

It was also because Oliver Wendell Holmes 
knew his town and fellow-townsmen so well, 

67 



68 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

and was addressing himself to all the breakfast- 
tables in Boston that he was able to speak 
with such directness, such ease and such 
fearlessness. 

There is no need to speak now of the wit 
of the " Autocrat/' but there is still occasion 
to remind the reader of its wisdom, and of the 
fact that the book was not written for the sake 
of displaying the author's gift of humour, — 
it is in the very best sense an autobiography 
in which the author goes back upon every 
phase of his life, not for the pleasure of reminis- 
cence, but for the sake of garnering his experience 
for himself and for his readers, and from its 
pages the reader can gather more than a handful 
of sayings which constitute the Golden Book 
of Oliver Wendell Holmes on the conduct of 
life. 

It has been Dr. Holmes' misfortune, both 
as a poet and prose- writer, to be compared to 
many men by virtue of a very superficial resem- 
blance of his work to theirs. He was a " miscel- 
laneous " writer, as was Sterne, but there is 
nothing in the individuality of their works 
to afford a comparison, and Goldsmith in the 
" Bee " adopted a familiar vein, as did Dr. 
Holmes, but the comparison cannot be carried 
legitimately any further. 

Sir Thomas Browne, Lamb, Fuller, Sydney 
Smith are the names of a few only of the many 



The Autocrat. 69 

who have been called to stand beside Oliver 
Wendell Holmes, for the sake of comparing 
their height and size and features with his. 
But though these writers had humour, and 
often wrote in a manner that brings them very 
close to us while we are reading, there is not 
one of them who comes so close as does the 
" Autocrat/ ' He is beside us all the while ; 
we see his face pucker in anticipation of a 
humorous sentence he means to bring out, 
or grow grave as he offers us some truth that 
has cost him dearly to learn ; or wistful as his 
imagination haunts the past, and he talks 
on in the vein of tender reminiscence forgetful 
of our presence for the moment. Then he 
endears himself to us because he is never con- 
descending. We can tell he is anxious to see 
that what he says has the effect he intended ; 
he wants us to mingle our laughter with his ; 
he wants us to appreciate with sense and 
gratitude what he offers us as the ripest gleaning 
of his experience, and he is able to forget 
the superficial distinctions that separate men, 
and to actually feel that the deep and elemental 
principles of our nature are common to all 
men. 

So he wrote alw r ays with the feeling that 
what had pleased him would please another, 
and what he had found of value in his adventures 
through life would be helpful to another, as he 



70 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

himself said, — " It is because you are just like 
me that I talk, and know that you will listen/ ' 

The chief characteristic of his first and most 
notable prose work is its discursiveness. The 
writer wanders almost casually, as it appears 
sometimes, from subject to subject, but now he 
lingers to play over some whimsical or even 
serious idea with a kind of summer-lightning 
humour, and now he sheds a twilight and 
haunting beauty, or again he rains sharp, 
burning flashes upon some of our own ideas 
to show us of what stubble they are made, 
or fetches a beam that penetrates the opaque 
covering that custom and convention have 
wrapped around a subject, and shows us the 
heart of truth that these best allies of our life 
have somehow or other obscured or hidden; 
perhaps from their over-anxiety to preserve 
alive. 

The conversational style of the " Autocrat," 
which seems so casual, and perhaps easy 
to imitate until one attempts it — was not chosen 
at hazard, but was the deliberate application 
of the rule he proposed to himself in ordinary 
conversation : — 

" Talk about those subjects you have had 
long in your mind, and listen to what others 
say about subjects you have studied but 
recently. Knowledge and timber should not be 
much used till they are seasoned/' 






The Autocrat. 71 

This is what accounts for the freshness and 
the apparent ease and spontaneity of the 
book, not that he offered his readers whatever 
came into his mind at the moment, and offered 
it for what it happened to be worth, but that 
he gave them the result of long pondering over 
men and ideas and books, and gave what he 
had found to be of worth to himself. 

The same may be said of the " Autocrat 
of the Breakfast Table " as Coventry Patmore 
remarked of his small volume of " Sayings/' 
when asked how long it had taken him to write 
it, viz., that it had taken him all the years 
of his life up to the time of his actually penning 
the book. 

Dr. Holmes himself anticipates the criticism 
that the style and discursive nature of the 
book suggests when he says, " Do not think 
because I talk to you of many subjects briefly 
that I should not find it much lazier work 
to take each one of them and dilute it down 
to an essay," and a few quotations are sufficient 
to prove that the work does not consist of the 
remarks of a clever man upon every conceivable 
subject that offers, but are the mature work 
of a mind that has ripened slowly : — 

Any new formula which suddenly emerges in our 
consciousness has its roots in long trains of thought, 
it is virtually old when it first makes its appearance 
among the recognised growths of intellect . . A 



74 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

The age at which he wrote the " Autocrat " 
was the age at which most men are " startled M 
by having themselves seriously called " old 
for the first time," it was the age at which 
men go back over the way they have come, 
surprised to find how dim and remote some 
phases of their life have become ; it is also the 
time when they begin to compute the years, 
to weigh up what life has brought them or what 
is the residuum of their living, and what it is 
still likely to have in store — and we find the 
" Autocrat " doing all these things. 

We could have judged of the time of life of the 
author of the " Autocrat " if we had not known 
who wrote it. No man could have penned 
that chapter on old age but one who was 
aware that he was traversing that decade of 
years which separates, like a neutral territory, 
maturity and old age, and who was looking 
round to see whether perchance he might 
renew his youth, or whether wisdom called him 
to readjust his life in view of the change that 
the years had brought and must bring. There 
is a large tolerance and charity, too, which 
warmly tempers the writer's view of men 
and things, andis too mellow to belong to 
youth. 

His description of the coming of old age is 
well worth quoting here, if only as a specimen 
of his best prose style : — 



The Autocrat. 75 

Like all Nature's processes, it is gentle and gradual 
in its approaches, strewed with illusions, and all its 
little griefs are soothed by natural sedatives. But the 
iron hand is not less irresistible because it wears the 
velvet glove. The button- wood throws off its bark in 
large flakes, which one may find lying at its foot, pushed 
out, and at last pushed off, by that tranquil movement 
from beneath, which is too slow to be seen, but too 
powerful to be arrested. One finds them always, but 
one rarely sees them fall. So it is our youth drops from 
us, — scales off, sapless and lifeless, and lays bare the 
tender and immature fresh growth of old age. 
Nature gets us out of youth into manhood, as sailors 
are hurried on board of vessels, — in a state of intoxi- 
cation. We are hustled into maturity reeling with 
our passions and imaginations, and we have drifted 
far from port before we awake out of our illusions. But 
to carry us out of maturity into old age, without one 
knowing where we are going, she drugs us with strong 
opiates, and so we struggle along with wide open eyes 
that see nothing until snow enough has fallen on our 
heads to rouse our comatose brains out of their stupid 
trances. 

Very little has ever been said of Oliver 
Wendell Holmes' style, and yet in passages 
like this it is gently rhythmic and beautiful, 
and often when he is looking away and writing, 
his prose has a warm, tender glow about it, as 
of autumn and evening. 

He turned to his childhood and youth, 
to his life in Paris, and his experience as a 
doctor and lecturer for his illustrations and 
anecdote and reminiscence, and his contact 



76 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

with life under so many disguises which his 
calling compelled him to, and his view of life 
from so many aspects which his impressible 
mind and his opportunity allowed, give to the 
philosophy of life which he expounds in the 
" Autocrat/' a rounded and sometimes a final 
stamp. 

His message, if we may use the term in refer- 
ence to Oliver Wendell Holmes' teaching, had 
little to do with dogmas as we usually under- 
stand them, although he was often enough 
dogmatic. He preached no creed, and advanced 
no special theory, but with an optimism more 
wise, though less extravagant than Browning's, 
he taught that life is a noble calling, and that 
a man's adventure through time might be, 
and ought to be, a glad one as well as a useful 
one. 

He taught the common virtues in an un- 
common way. He told his readers what was 
known to them, but in such a way as to make 
them start as at the meeting of an almost 
forgotten acquaintance. 

He often thrust his staff of truth under 
some old lie that had been allowed to rest too 
long undisturbed in the general mind, and 
turned it over, exposing to daylight the ugly 
and venomous things that habited beneath it, 
and he sometimes set his staff of sincerity 
against a stone that some worshipped as a truth, 



The Autocrat. 77 

and were willing to defend as such, but he did 
not mind being criticised. 

"I wonder/ ' he says, "if anybody ever finds fault 
with anything I say at this table when it is repeated ? 
I hope they do, I am sure. I should be very certain 
that I had said nothing of much significance if they did 
not." 

But if he spoke with utmost sincerity upon 
all occasions, whatever the consequence, and 
whether doing so to-morrow meant he must 
deny what he had taught the day before, 
he was never harsh or contemptuous of men, 
even in speaking of qualities in them that he 
hated. 

He hated meanness, — " the only impiety," 
as Epictetus says — and untruthfulness — the 
handle to all sin's weapons, as he calls it — and 
in the " Autocrat " frequently by implication 
begs his hearers to hate these vices and love 
the corresponding virtues, but he teaches a 
wonderful charity toward those whose spiritual 
nature is halt or lame or bitter ugly. 

" It is such a sad thing to be born a sneaking fellow, 
so much worse than to inherit a hump-back or a couple 
of club feet, that I sometimes feel as if we ought to 
love the crippled souls — if I may use this expression — 
with a certain tenderness which we need not waste on 
noble natures." 

There is much in this book to make us lean 
towards tolerance, but no suggestion of lowering 



78 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

the moral standard of living, and if sometimes 
for a moment we feel that the author is speaking 
in a dangerously gentle manner, we are soon 
made to understand that he is dexterous in the 
use of the whip, and can administer sharp, 
wholesome rebuke, as well as cover with his 
charity a multitude of sins. 

His teaching is vigorous and tonic, and the 
book indicates a wonderful independence of 
mind, and inculcates that upon his hearers. 
He hated ready-made opinions, and would not 
have them himself at any price ; and if he was 
ever contemptuous, which one doubts, it was 
with respect to those who never bestir themselves 
to discover a truth on their own behalf. 

He says : — 

Many a man 
Owes to his country his religion, 
And in another would as strongly grow 
Had but his nurse and mother taught him so. 

And it was not only with respect to those who 
never discover their religion for themselves 
that he spoke in this half-contemptuous manner 
but with respect to any who were willing to take 
unchallenged an opinion from another. 

We have spoken chiefly of the " Autocrat 
of the Breakfast Table," as a book of experience, 
because it owed so much to the author's reading 
of life, and so little, comparatively, to culture. 



The Autocrat. 79 

Oliver Wendell Holmes was, of course, a 
very cultured man, and widely read, or he could 
never have uttered himself so poignantly upon 
so many subjects, but there is nothing bookish 
about his table-talk, and he drew very slightly 
upon his book-knowledge for it ; yet there is 
evidence not only that he had read books, 
but that he had studied the art of writing 
books. 

It is very seldom, if ever, noticed that the 
" Autocrat of the Breakfast Table " owes a 
great deal to art, even with respect to its form. 
It is not brilliant table-talk after all, and though 
there is no story running through the papers 
that compose the book, yet when we turn the 
last leaf we have made acquaintance with 
several personalities in addition to that of the 
chief speaker, and it is a very curious fact that 
we have arrived at our knowledge of the other 
boarders at the table, not altogether or even 
chiefly by their contributions to the conver- 
sation, but by the different ways in which the 
" Autocrat " speaks to them, or passes them 
over, when they venture upon a remark. 

Before speaking of the many qualities 
of humour which characterise this book, and 
which there is little occasion to mention at 
all, two passages may be quoted, — the first 
to show how entirely orginal was the use he 
made of illustrations that are generally con- 



80 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

sidered hackneyed, and the second to indicate 
how poignant his style and thought frequently 
are : — 

Nothing strikes one more in the race of life than to see 
how many give out in the first half of the course. 

Ten years gone. First turn in the race. A few 
broken down. Two or three bolted. Several show in 
advance of the ruck. Cassock, a black colt, seems to be 
ahead of the rest ; those black colts commonly get the 
start, I have noticed, of the others, in the first quarter. 
Meteor has pulled up. 

Twenty years. Second corner turned. Cassock 
has dropped from the front, and Judex, an iron-gray, 
has the lead. But look ! how they have thinned out ! 
Down flat, — five, — six, — how many ? They lie still 
enough ! they will not get up again in this race, be very 
sure ! And the rest of them, what a " tailing off " ! 
Anybody can see who is going to win, — perhaps. 

Thirty years. Third corner turned. Dives, bright 
sorrel, ridden by the fellow in the yellow jacket, begins 
to make play fast ; is getting to be the favourite with 
many. But who is that other one that has been lengthen- 
ing his stride from the first, and now shows close up 
to the front ? Don't you remember the quiet brown 
colt Asteroid, with the star in his forehead ? . . . 

Forty years. More dropping off, — but places much 
as before. 

Fifty years. Race over. All that are on the course 
are coming in at a walk ; no more running. Who is 
ahead ? Ahead ? What ! and the winning-post a 
slab of white or gray stone standing out from that turf 
where there is no more jockeying or straining for victory ! 
Well, the world marks their places in its betting-book ; 



The Autocrat. 81 

but be sure that these matter very little, if they have 
run as well as they knew how ! 

And this other quotation where he also makes 
use of a common illustration but which is 
quoted for its poignant style : — 

Tic ! Tac ! go the wheels of thought — our will cannot 
stop them ; they cannot stop themselves ; sleep cannot 
still them ; madness only makes them go faster . . . 

If we could only get at them as we lie on our pillows, 
count the dead beats of thought after thought, and image 
after image jarring through the over-tired organs ! 
Will nobody block those wheels ? uncouple that pinion ? 
cut the string that holds -these weights ? blow up the 
infernal machine with gunpowder ? What a passion 
comes over us sometimes for silence and rest ! 

The infinite variety of the humour of the 
" Autocrat/' ranging from broadest burlesque 
to the most subtle shades, has not been 
spoken of because it is too obvious to call for 
much remark and has so often been insisted 
upon to the obscuring of other equally important 
aspects of Oliver Wendell Holmes' genius. 

He himself was well aware of the detriment 
his reputation was likely to suffer from folk 
regarding him solely as a humorist and reading 
his books for their wit and drollery, forgetting 
all the while the deep significance of much that 
he was writing. 

" I like to make you laugh well enough,' ' he says," when 
I can, but then observe this : if the sense of the ridiculous 
is one side of an impressible nature, it is very well ; but 



82 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

if that is all there is in a man, he had better have been 
an ape at once, and so have stood at the head of his 
profession." 

A little later he remarks : — 

It is a very dangerous thing for a literary man to 
indulge his love for the ridiculous. People laugh with 
him just as long as he amuses them ; but if he attempts 
to be serious, they must still have their laugh, and so 
they laugh at him " ; 

and there is no doubt he was not always pleased 
to find himself perpetually teased by friend 
and acquaintance for something entertaining, 
and to see that their impatience for the opening 
pun led them to neglect what he considered 
the most important part of his work. 

George Augustus Sala insists upon his being 
essentially a " funny man," and surely mistakes, 
somewhat, the quality of his humour when 
he says, " He does not make you sigh even 
while you laugh : you laugh at him just as 
you would at a droll face or a comic picture/' 
But this is not the whole truth ; in fact, it is 
hardly the truth at all. His humour has many 
qualities ; sometimes it is nothing more than 
good-natured pun ; sometimes it is bold, or 
even audacious, but when we speak of 
him as a humorist we must not forget that 
there have been no great humorists who have 
not been artists at the same time. Humour 
without art is likely to furnish but a vulgar 
and farcical entertainment. 



The Autocrat. 83 

Oliver Wendell Holmes was an artist ; his 
humour is a subtle and delicate instrument 
which he could use not only to entertain his 
friends, but to punish his enemies if he would. 
When he tinges his humour with a not unkindly 
satire, we find him at his best, and the following 
quotation shows him in a vein of sly humour 
in which he excelled : — 

If you ever saw a crow with a king-bird after him, 
you will get an image of a dull speaker and a lively 
listener. . . 

I found these remarks were received rather coolly. 
. So I went to my good old minister and repeated 
the remarks as nearly as I could remember them to him. 
He laughed good-naturedly, and said there was 
considerable truth in them. He thought he could tell 
when people's minds were wandering by their looks. 
In the early years of his ministry he had sometimes 
noticed this when he was preaching — very little of late 
years. Sometimes when his colleague was preaching 
he observed this kind of inattention. 

This quotation is evidently from the work 
of an artist, and not of one who was simply 
a " funny man," who makes one laugh on 
account of his genial comicality. It is really 
extraordinary to remark what a master he 
was in the art of using his humorous gifts. 
He makes us laugh often, it is true, with no 
other purpose in view than to do so. He uses 
his gift to win our love for some characters 
we are too apt to pass over with contempt, 



84 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

or our recognition of some truth the most of 
us fail to see ; but at other times he makes 
Error stand and confess with shame by shower- 
ing him with ridicule ; or he uses his humour 
as the boys use a pliant stick, and with one 
swish cuts off some thistle head of arrogance, 
or ignorance, or imposture. 

It is not to be imagined that a book like 
the " Autocrat of the Breakfast Table " escaped 
criticism. It was an entirely new development 
in American literature, and there were a number 
who were ready to cavil at it. Some disliked 
the incoherence of the work, some the humour, 
some the opinions of the " Autocrat/' but an 
answer to nearly all its critics may be found in 
the book itself. There was a reason for his 
commencing the fourth paper with a humorous 
account of his correspondence relative to the 
Breakfast Table talks : — 

No. 1 wants serious and earnest thought. 

No. 2 (letter smells of bad cigars) must have more 
jokes ; wants me to tell a " good storey " which he has 
copied out for me. (I suppose two letters before the 
word " good " refer to some Doctor of Divinity who told 
the story). 

No. 3 (in female hand), more poetry. 

No. 4 wants something that would be of use to a prac- 
tical man. 

No. 5 (gilt-edged, sweet-scented)—" more sentiment," 
" heart's outpourings.' ' 



The Autocrat. 85 

As various as these and more numerous were 
the requirements of some who published their 
criticism of the first papers, but there is no 
doubt they were silenced before the series 
concluded, either by the general appreciation 
which the book received, or the swift thrusts 
it gave. The following sentence must have 
been more than satisfaction to some critics. 
Speaking of the logical mind, Dr. Holmes 
says : — 

I should say its most frequent work was to build a 
pons asinorum over chasms that shrewd people can 
bestride without such a structure. 

The way he told the story of Sydney Smith 
probably reached some others, but he never 
replied to his critics except in this impersonal 
way, and, although he disliked their calling 
he was even kindly toward them and had a 
very tender regard for the poor little " paste- 
board " reputation of some of them. 

This book, dipped from the running stream 
of his thought, as Dr. Holmes says of it, is, perhaps, 
his best title to fame and our best portrait 
of the author. He speaks to us freely, telling 
us his opinions of men and things, his whims, 
his likes and dislikes, and even his loves and 
hatreds, and when we turn the last page with 
regret, we put the book upon a shelf that 
contains a very few volumes which are honoured 
not for their wit or wisdom alone, but because 



86 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

they have aroused in us a deep and intimate 
affection for their author. 

The pages of the " Autocrat " were sprinkled 
with poems which was an offence to some, 
but which enhanced the charm of the book 
to the majority of its readers. Dr. Holmes 
had, previous to the year 1857, collected 
his occasional poems into a volume once or 
twice, and had gained a considerable reputation 
locally as a poet, but the poems in the " Auto- 
crat, " which are among his best, enlarged and 
established his name as a poet, and it may be 
as well to consider him under this aspect now. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE POET. 

At first we thought him but a jest, 

A ray of laughter, quick to fade ; 

We did not dream how richly blest 

In his pure life our lives were made ; 
Till soon the aureole shone, confest, 
Upon his crest. 

— William Winter. 

Q LIVER WENDELL HOLMES commenced 
^ verse-making before he could write, and 
he continued to do so through the whole of an 
exceptionally long life. At an age that few 
men attain, and at which fewer still can hold 
a pen, he was writing his last poem to his 
classmates of 1829. 

During these years he wrote humorous, 
pathetic, satiric, epigrammatic, ballad, and, 
in fact, every form of verse. He excelled in 
the '• light patrician art " of vers de societe 
and has given inspiration perhaps to Austin 
Dobson and others of our own day. But his 
title to our long remembrance depends upon 
a few short poems, and his poetical work quite 

87 



88 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

naturally suggests that invidious distinction 
between poetry and humorous and other 
kinds of verse. 

Every critic has sent an arrow at " winged 
poesy," in the fond hope of bringing the bird 
to ground for close inspection, but they have 
only succeeded in driving her among the clouds, 
and in fact, her glory depends upon the upper 
air and the height she keeps, and could we 
take her at will, we should be no less dis- 
appointed than when we first discover that 
the gleaming pebble in the stream is no other 
than a dull and colourless stone when we cast 
it upon the high road. 

The many definitions of poetry which have 
been attempted, even those of Hazlitt and 
Coleridge, are the worst of all definitions, and 
the sure test of poetry is not that it conforms 
to certain dogmata, but that it has its due effect 
upon the reader. The effect of great poetry 
is to suggest more than it tells, to make us feel 
that there is poetry in the air, and to make us 
aware of a haunting sense of kinship with a 
region of nobler thought and finer feeling than 
that in which we habitually move. 

Only occasionally did Dr. Holmes write poetry 
that will fulfil this test. He deserves to be 
known as a poet, for he had the highest con- 
ception of the poet's office — to write down what 
he must ; to be at the will of his inspiration 



The Poet. 89 

— but his poems are seldom inevitable, and it 
is a curious fact that the few that are of a very- 
high order and urge us to use the word " in- 
spiration " to account for them, are written 
in a style and metre that was not habitual 
to Oliver Wendell Holmes, and is not charac- 
teristic of him as a poet. 

Mr. Stead, who has made some shrewd 
" guesses at truth/' remarks that Holmes was 
at his best in " The Chambered Nautilus " 
and " The Two Armies." There seems no 
reason for particularising the latter, and still 
less for the strange conjunction of the two, 
but with regard to the remark that Oliver 
Wendell Holmes was at his best in the former, 
meaning that the poem typified him, although 
wishing it were the fact one must dissent from 
the criticism. 

In this poem, and " Musa," and here and 
there in other verses taken from his work, 
Oliver Wendell Holmes was beside himself. 
His muse had her way with him, and found 
little hindrance, though some may find the 
presence of the last few lines in the " Nautilus " 
an artistic flaw, saving the poem from perfec- 
tion, and may wish that the wind of inspiration 
instead of fluttering the preacher's gown, which 
he so often donned, had swept it clean 
away. Such fastidious artists, however, must 
be very few. 

7 



90 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS. 

This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign, 

Sails the unshadowed main, — 

The venturous bark that flings 
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings 
In gulfs enchanted, where the siren sings, 

And coral reefs lie bare, 
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming 
hair. 

Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl ; 

Wrecked is the ship of pearl ! 

And every chambered cell, 
Where its dim streaming life was wont to dwell, 
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell, 

Before thee lies revealed, — 
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed ! 

Year after year beheld the silent toil 

That spread his lustrous coil ; 

Still, as the spiral grew, 
He left the past year's dwelling for the new, 
Stole with soft step its shining archway through, 

Built up its idle door, 
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old 
no more. 



Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, 

As the swift seasons roll ! 

Leave thy low- vaulted past ! 
Let each new temple, nobler than the last 
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, 

Till thou at length are free, 
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea. 






The Poet. 91 

This poem, and " Musa," — from which a 
quotation is given below — are reminiscent 
of the seventeenth century, whereas Oliver 
Wendell Holmes was a survival of the eighteenth. 
In fact, he was the last of that century's 
poets, — at home with the straight-backed 
measure of Pope, — and it is curious to notice 
that, while his poetry is as a rule so remote 
from that of our modern poets, in these two 
poems he comes quite close to them, and we 
recognise some of the same qualities that 
characterise the work of Francis Thompson and 
others. 

O my lost Beauty ! — hast thou folded quite 

Thy wings of morning light 

Beyond those iron gates, 
Where Life crowds hurrying to the haggard Fates, 
And Age upon his mound of ashes waits 

To chill our fiery dreams, 
Hot from the heart of youth plunged in his icy 
streams ? 

Leave me not fading in these wings of care, 
Those flowers are silvered hair !— 
Have I not loved thee long, 

Though my young lips have often done thee wrong 

And vexed thy heaven-tuned ear with careless song ? 
Ah, wilt thou yet return, 

Bearing thy rose-hued torch, and bid thine altar 

burn ? 

* * * * 

Thou shalt be decked with jewels, like a queen, 
Sought in those bowers of greeu 



92 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

Where loop the clustered vines 
And the close-clinging dulcamara twines, — 
Pure pearls of Maydew where the moonlight shines, 

And summer's fruited gems, 
And coral pendants shorn from Autumn's berried 
stems. 

— From Musa. 

The extracts here given are from his best 
work, but not from his most popular poems. 
" Enoch Arden " is better known than 
" jEnone," and the " Pied Piper " than " A 
Death in the Desert," and from among Dr. 
Holmes' poems " The Last Leaf " has won 
a larger tribute of praise than " The Chambered 
Nautilus/' His biographer implies that this 
popularity should give it precedence in our 
estimate of his poems, and treats with a shade 
of impatience those who judge of poetry by 
other than the popular standard. 

The simple and touching beauty of " The 
Last Leaf " is sufficient to account for its large 
appeal, but we must remember that it also 
commends itself to those who read little poetry, 
because it requires no concentration, and the 
fool may run as he reads ; whereas a poem of 
high imaginative quality makes a large demand 
upon the reader, both of intellect and imagin- 
ation, because even the great poets have so 
often light enough by which to see clearly for 
themselves, but so rarely light and heat sufficient 



The Poet. 93 

to transfigure wholly the vision for their readers, 
and only for the briefest moments have the 
greatest poets been so wrought upon themselves 
as to be able to transmute their vision into a 
new and near reality for their readers. When 
this has been the case, art has wholly triumphed, 
and we easily enter into the poet's labour, 
and reap where we have not strawed. 

Although " The Last Leaf " is not — save 
perhaps in one verse, — a poem of great imagina- 
tive quality, it is a fine piece, and it is quoted 
here not only because it is so well known, 
and has appealed so widely as to include 
among its admirers men of such dissimilar minds 
as Edgar Allan Poe, — who is America's greatest 
literary artist — and Abraham Lincoln, — but 
also because it illustrates the qualities which 
made Oliver Wendell Holmes a supreme writer 
of vers & occasion. 

The best poems that are included under 
this generalisation depend upon both humour 
and pathos for their effect, but the humour 
must never degenerate into jocosity, nor the 
pathos become harrowing. It is better if the 
pathos induce a sigh, rather than force a tear, 
and the humour call for a smile, rather than 
compel laughter. Dr. Holmes wrote many 
poems in which humour and pathos are deli- 
cately blended, but, of these, " The Last Leaf " 
is the supreme example : — 



94 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

THE LAST LEAF. 

I saw him once before, 
As he passed by the door, 

And again 
The pavement stones resound 
As he totters o'er the ground 

With his cane. 

They say that in his prime, 
Ere the pruning-knife of Time 

Cut him down, 
Not a better man was found 
By the Crier on his round 

Through the town. 

But now he walks the streets, 
And he looks at all he meets 

Sad and wan. 
And he shakes his feeble head 
That it seems as if he said, 

" They are gone." 

The mossy marbles rest 

On the lips that he has prest 

In their bloom, 
And the names he loved to hear 
Have been carved for many a year 

On the tomb. 

My grandmamma has said — 
Poor old lady, she is dead 

Long ago — 
That he had a Roman nose, 
And his cheek was like a rose 

In the snow. 



The Poet. 95 



But now his nose is thin, 
And it rests upon his chin 

Like a staff ; 
And a crook is in his back, 
Anol a melancholy crack 

In his laugh. 

I know it is a sin 
For me to sit and grin 

At him here ; 
But the old three-cornered hat, 
And the breeches and all that 

Are so queer ! 

And if I should live to be 
The last leaf upon the tree 

In the spring, 
Let them smile as I do now 
At the old forsaken bough 

Where I cling. 



" The Treadmill Song " and " My Aunt " 
are poems which exhibit the same qualities, 
and from the latter we quote three verses : — 

My aunt ! My poor deluded aunt ! 

Her hair is almost gray ; 
Why will she train that winter curl 

In such a spring-like way ? 
How can she lay her glasses down, 

And say she reads as well, 
When through a double convex lens 

She just makes out to spell ? 



96 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

Her father — Grandpapa ! forgive 

This erring lip its smiles — 
Vowed she should make the finest girl 

Within a hundred miles ; 
He sent her to a stylish school ; 

'Twas in her thirteenth June, 
And with her, as the rules required, 

Two towels and a spoon. 



Alas ! nor chariot, nor barouche, 

Nor bandit cavalcade, 
Tore from the trembling father's arms 

His all-accomplished maid. 
For her how happy had it been ! 

And Heaven had spared to me 
To see one sad, ungathered rose 

On my ancestral tree. 

Holmes has been compared to almost all 
the humorous poets of England and America, 
but to little purpose. It is possible, if one 
fancies the task, to find quite a number of lines 
that remind one of Browning, and verses that 
might have been written by Moore, and, 
stranger still, a line reminiscent of Meredith, 
but we know quite well that the qualities which 
distinguish these poets bear no comparison 
with those that characterise Dr. Holmes' verse, 
and it is hardly nearer the truth to say he 
is like Hood or like Praed. He resembles 
Hood in the one particular that he has a rare 



The Poet. 97 

gift of humour, but as a poet he does not 
resemble Hood any more or as much as he 
does Goldsmith, and this insistance upon 
comparisons between Holmes and other writers 
of humorous verse has done much to injure 
his reputation by detracting from the individu- 
ality of it, and by constantly calling attention 
to one aspect of it. 

We are apt to take him up expecting to 
be made to laugh, and this attitude is not 
even conducive to our appreciating his humorous 
poems, which contain so many subtleties 
beside his jests. He was not a writer of rhymed 
jests, but a poet first, and a humorist after- 
wards, according to his own estimate, and it 
is fair to recollect this in reading his works 
or speaking of them. Before dealing with his 
distinctively humorous poems, a quotation 
may be given which is a beautiful example 
of another kind that is not very often mentioned. 

Her hands are cold ; her face is white ; 
No more her pulses come and go ; 

Her eyes are shut to life and light ; 
Fold the white vesture, snow on snow, 
And lay her where the violets blow. 

But not beneath a graven stone, 
To plead for tears with alien eyes ; 

A slender cross of wood alone 
Shall say that here a maiden lies 
In peace beneath the peaceful skies. 



98 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

And gray old trees of hugest limb 

Shall wheel their circling shadows round 

To make the scorching sunlight dim 

That drinks the greenness from the ground, 
And drop their dead leaves on her mound. 



When, turning round their dial-track, 
Eastward the lengthening shadows pass, 

Her little mourners, clad in black, 

The cricket, sliding through the grass, 
Shall pipe for her an evening mass. 

At last the rootlets of the trees 

Shall find the prison where she lies, 

And bear the buried dust they seize 
In leaves and blossoms to the skies. 
So may the soul that warmed it rise ! 

— Under the Violets. 

It is quite possible to find among Holmes' 
humorous poems a verse here and there in which 
the humour seems laboured, or the jest wedged 
in with difficulty, and occasionally one in which 
the puns are rapped out with annoying fre- 
quency, and irritate like the perpetual tapping 
of a small hammer ; but, as a rule, the humour 
flows easily and generously through the poem, 
giving to the whole a rich flavour. 

Where he tells a story he succeeds supremely, 
as in the " Deacon's Masterpiece " — that sly 
satire upon Calvinistic theology — " that was 



The Poet. 99 

built in such a logical way," and " Parson 
TurrelFs Legacy.' ' 

These poems cannot be quoted from, but 
must be given entirely or not at all, and they 
are too long to allow of transcribing them 
here. Some verses may be quoted, however, 
" The Music Grinders " — a humorous poem 
almost as good as those mentioned, but written 
in another vein : — 

There are three ways in which men take 

One's money from his purse, 
And very hard it is to tell 

Which of the three is worse ; 
But all of them are bad enough 

To make a body curse. 

You're riding out some pleasant day, 

And counting up your gains ; 
A fellow jumps out from a bush 

And takes your horse's reins, 
Another hints some words about 

A bullet in your brains. 

It's hard to meet such pressing friends 

In such a lonely spot ; 
It's very hard to lose your cash, 

But harder to be shot ; 
And so you take your wallet out, 

Though you would rather not. 
* * * * 

You're sitting on your window-seat 

Beneath a cloudless moon : 
You hear a sound, that seems to wear 

The semblance of a tune ; 



ioo Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

As if a broken fife should strive 
To drown a cracked bassoon. 

Poor " Home, sweet home " should seem to be 

A very dismal place : 
Your " Auld Acquaintance/ ' all at once, 

Is altered in the face ; 
Their discords sting through Burns and Moore, 

Like hedgehogs dressed in lace. 

But hark ! the air again is still, 

The music all is ground, 
, And silence, like a poultice, comes 

To heal the blows of sound ; 
It cannot be — it is — it is — 

A hat is going round ! 

One class of humorous poems he made 
peculiarly his own, to which "The Stethoscope 
Song " and " Nux Postcoeantica " belong, 
and whose titles sufficiently indicate their 
medical character. From the first of these — 
which is a little overdone, and in which an 
excellent idea is made to serve too long a 
turn — the following verses are taken : — 

There was a young man in Boston town, 
He bought a stethoscope nice and new, 

All mounted, and finished, and polished down, 
With an ivory cap and a stopper, too. 

It happened a spider within did crawl, 

And spun him a web of ample size, 
Wherein there chanced one day to fall 

A couple of very impudent flies. 



The Poet. 101 

Ths first was a bottle-fly, big and blue, 

The second was smaller, and thin and long, 

So there was a concert between the two, 
Like an octave flat and a tavern gong. 

Now, being from Paris but recently, 

This fine young man would show his skill, — 

And so they gave him, his hand to try, 
A hospital patient extremely ill. 

Some said that his liver was short of bile, 
And some that his heart was over-size, 

While some kept arguing all the while 

He was crammed with tubercles up to his eyes. 

This fine young man then up stepped he, 

And all the doctors made a pause, 
Said he, — " The man must die, you see, 

By the fifty-seventh of Louis's laws." 

And from " Nux Postcoenatica " — a poem 
written somewhere in the forties — the following 
verses are interesting as containing some 
humorous reflections upon his own career as 
a doctor and certainly containing some truth : — 

Besides — my prospects — don't you know that people 

won't employ 
A man that wrongs his manliness by laughing like a 

boy ? 
And suspect the azure blossom that unfolds upon a shoot, 
As if wisdom's old potato could not flourish at its root ? 

It's a very fine reflection, when you're etching out a 

smile 
On a copperplate of faces that would stretch at least 

a mile, 



102 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

That, what with sneers from enemies, and cheapening 

shrugs of friends, 
It will cost you all the earnings that a month o f labour 

lends ! 

It's a vastly pleasing prospect when you're screwing out 

a laugh, 
That your very next year's income is diminished by a 

half, 
And a little boy trips barefoot that Pegasus may go, 
And the baby's milk is watered that your Helicon may 

flow. 

From the same poem we quote a verse which 
is an example of a humorous style he seldom 
indulged : — 
Why, if Columbus should be there, the company would 

beg 
He'd show that little trick of his of balancing the egg ! 
Milton to Stilton would give in, and Solomon to Salmon, 
And Roger Bacon be a bore, and Francis Bacon gammon ! 

Holmes has written humorous verse in 
many veins. Sometimes he is whimsical, and 
his verse is full of quaint turns of thought 
and expression ; sometimes hilarious ; some- 
times indulging in the punning style, or playing 
upon words ; or again giving his humorous 
verse a satiric touch, or lending satire the 
wings of humour to carry it swiftly home. 
If the reader wishes to see Oliver Wendell 
Holmes at his worst, he might turn to the 
poem entitled, " Evening " (by a tailor), which 
is dreadfully laboured ; and if he wish to read 



The Poet. 103 

one of his early efforts, which has been far 
more popular than it deserves, he should turn 
to the " Spectre Rig." 

His patriotic poems, — of which he wrote a 
good number — are worthy of remark, not 
only because he wrote one in his youth which 
stirred his generation, and is capable of rousing 
us to-day, but because they exemplify his 
intense Conservatism, as well as his intense 
Americanism. 

We have spoken chiefly of the shorter pieces, 
but he composed some longer poems in the 
style which he so loved, and which is so notice- 
able a feature of the eighteenth century. In 
this style— the rhymed couplet — he wrote the 
f< Metrical Essay," which he read before the 
Phi Beta Kappa Society, and which is inter- 
esting in itself, apart from the fact that it 
exemplifies many of the qualities and some of 
the defects of the poetry of his masters. 

Miss Mitford, who was the first to bring 
Holmes' poetry to great notice in England, 
remarks his journey to the eighteenth century, 
and urges the poets of her own day to follow 
his example, for she appreciated the polish 
and the clear-cut style of his verse. The 
advice was not good in her day, and, happily 
the poets did not follow it, but the eighteenth 
century was suffering a good deal of abuse 
at that time, from which it has since been 



104 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

rescued, and it was well to be reminded of the 
peculiar excellencies of the poetry of that age. 

Eighteenth century poetry is largely the 
poetry of analysis — the analysis of manners 
and customs — and Holmes belonged to this 
century in so far as he was an observer rather 
than an interpreter. 

One is forcibly reminded of Dryden while 
reading the " Metrical Essay," and frequent 
passages from his poems in this style recall 
Goldsmith. The following lines show Holmes 
at his best in this form of composition : — 

The bloodless sickle lent the warriors steel, 
The harvest bowed beneath his chariot wheel, 
Where late the wood-dove sheltered her repose 
The raven waited for the conflict's close. 
The cuirassed sentry walked his sleepless round, 
Where Daphne smiled or Amaryllis frowned, 
Where timid minstrels sung their blushing charms, 
Some wild Tyrtaeus called aloud, ' To Arms ! " 

— Metrical Essay. 

And these antithetical lines show that he 
had learned from his masters in this style 
something beside their excellencies : — 

The thrill of triumph and the gasp of woe, 
The tender parting, and the glad return 
The festal banquet and the festal urn. 

— Metrical Essay. 

The most noticeable feature about Holmes 
as a poet, when we remember he was writing 



The Poet. 105 

between 1830 and 1890, is that he was not 
touched with the self-consciousness which 
characterises all our modern poets, any more 
than he was touched by the transcendentalism 
which was a growth of his own time and 
country. 

He wrote no intimate poetry, or, as he 
would call it, poetry of self-exposure, and 
never did fairly appreciate many of those poets 
who were writing in his time and whom he 
felt were cursed by over-sensibility, and 
weakened by their habits of introspection. 
He called their genius a kind of moonlight 
genius, given them by way of compensation 
for their imperfections of Nature, and he had 
little appreciation of their longing and loving 
and aspiring. He felt the kind of exhibition 
of themselves which this poetry offered was 
insufferable weakness. 

In the " Metrical Essay " he speaks of a race 
of poets bred " from decay as fungus growths 
arise/' who are " tired of the world whose 
joys they never knew," and he bids the " gentle 
maid " beware of their syren song. But his 
own poetry would have been better if he had 
been able to catch from them their love of 
words, and their haunting music. 

His verse was clear and epigrammatic, as 
became a lover of Pope, and often didactic 
as became the son of a Calvinistic minister, 



106 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

but it was not often musical ; he seldom wrote 
a verse that sings itself into our memory. 

He wrote his most excellent poems when he 
had a story or a character or an incident 
definitely in his mind, as in the case of " Agnes/' 
and "The Last Leaf/' which latter poem 
was suggested by the sight of old Major Melville 
in his cocked hat and breeches ; but he seldom 
penetrates " into that region where the air is 
music/ ' or heard " those primal warblings " 
which it is the poets' highest mission to write 
down, without adding to them or without taking 
away. 

Holmes was not gifted with a large imagina- 
tion. " For imagination he offers us fancy, 
which, however light and sportive it may be, 
is rarely creative. Instead of ideality he gives 
us conceits that are often apt, often graceful, 
and often, it must be added, pushed too far." 

Nor was he gifted with deep perception, 
but he possessed a very keen and ready per- 
ception of much that lay near the surface of 
life, and he had a bright fancy, and was 
felicitous in the use of apt and quaint illus- 
tration and beautiful simile, which lift his verse 
out of the commonplace, and save him from 
having frequent recourse to the poet's stock- 
in-trade. 

It is a little remarkable that one who wrote 
so much poetry, some of which is excellent, 









The Poet. 107 

should so seldom have written a verse or a line 
that prove his kinship with the truly great 
poets. 

The works of the minor poets contain passages 
or single lines that can only be attributed 
to the highest imagination, to a sudden and 
rare endowment, that send us to the work of 
the greatest poets for comparison. Ellery 
Channing wrote : — 

If my bark sink, 'tis to another sea, 

and this line, and some others from Mr. Hardy 
bear the authentic mark : — 

The old grey dial that points the bloody hour. 

Quotations from the great poets to illustrate 
our meaning would be easy : — 

The marble index of a mind for ever 

Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone, 

from Wordsworth ; or Byron's 

His eyes were with his heart, and that was far away. 

We do not mean that Oliver Wendell Holmes 
did not write lines like these, but that he 
wrote little, if anything, that was born of so 
high a flight as these. His poems were happy 
renderings rather than conceptions. He did 
not often brood, but as we have seen, he 
occasionally wrote a poem which suggests that 
he was capable of taking a higher place as a 
poet, if he had been willing to pay the price of 
his popularity. 



108 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

His poetry is as free from repellent egotism 
as was his life, and the qualities that endeared 
him as a man to those who knew him, endear 
him to his readers through his verse. 

It would not be well to leave his poetry 
without remembering the beautiful descriptive 
passages that abound in it, and quoting these 
two splendid lines : — 

The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould, 
Naked and shivering with his cup of gold, 

nor must one forget the few poems so delicately 
wrought, and so unlike his genius, of which 
this quotation from " The Toadstool " is an 
example : — 

She does not glow in a painted vest, 
And she never blooms on the maiden's breast ; 
But she comes, as the saintly sisters do, 
In a modest suit of a Quaker hue. 
And, when the stars in the evening skies 
Are weeping dew from their gentle eyes, 
The toad comes out from his hermit-cell, 
The tale of his faithful love to tell. 
O there is light in her lover's glance, 
That flies to her heart like a silver lance ; 
His breeches are made of spotted skin, 
His jacket is tight, and his pumps are thin ; 
In a cloudless night you may hear his song, 
As its pensive melody floats along, 
And, if you will look by the moonlight fair, 
The trembling form of the toad is there. 

He wrote many hymns which are justly 
entitled to be called poetry, and he desired 



The Poet. 109 

that he might be remembered by a few of 
them, and it is likely that his hymns will 
abide when his other work is forgotten. 

O Love Divine, that stooped to share 
Our sharpest pang, our bitterest tear, 

On Thee we cast each earth-born care, 
We smile at pain while Thou art near ! 

Though long the weary way we tread, 
And sorrow crown each lingering year, 

No path we shun, no darkness dread 

Our hearts still whispering, " Thou art near ! " 

When drooping pleasure turns to grief, 
And trembling faith is changed to fear, 

The murmuring wind, the quivering leaf, 
Shall softly tell us, " Thou art near." 

On Thee we fling our burdening woe, 

O Love divine, for ever dear, 
Content to suffer while we know, 

Living and dying, Thou art near ! 

— Hymn of Trust. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE PROFESSOR. 

The spring-tides are past, but no billow may reach 
The spoils they have landed far up on the beach. 

— Our Banker. 

T7ROM 1857, Dr. Holmes was embarked 
A upon a literary career. He retained 
his lectureship in Anatomy for a number of 
years, but apart from this connection he was 
a truant from his profession, and the incidents 
of his life — or rather those that are of public 
interest — resolve themselves chiefly into the 
production of his various works, and the 
pleasures and trials incidental to the literary 
life. 

From the time of the appearance of his first 
papers in the Atlantic Monthly, Oliver Wendell 
Holmes has assumed the title of the " Autocrat " 
in his readers' minds, but the mild benignity 
and the genial humour that seem to character- 
ise our impression of him to-day do not fairly 
represent the vigour, and even daring, of the 
" Autocrat " of 1857. 

The literary instrument he chose allowed 
him to " teach without being didactic, and 



The Professor. in 

preach without sermonising/ ' but his vigilant 
and independent mind, and his remarkable 
sincerity did not allow him to speak doubtfully 
where his own opinion would offend, nor to 
turn his attention from subjects and phases 
of life on which his own opinion was antagon- 
istic to the general mind. Many of his views 
that were dubbed heretical and infidel, have 
passed into the air we breath, and what was 
considered advanced in his day indicates a 
too conservative mind in ours. 

He suffered a good deal of reproach on the 
one hand for being a step in advance of his 
contemporaries, but there were those on the 
other who accused him of attaching excessive 
importance to conventionalities of dress and 
manner and speech, and charged him with 
using his influence to starve and paralyse 
literary originality. 

These matters are mentioned here to remind 
the reader that the " Autocrat " was in mid-life, 
and that far from leading a leisured life in a 
mellow and tempered atmosphere, he was a 
vigorous combatant, and one who was often 
challenged. 

The papers of the " Autocrat/' however, 
received more praise than they excited criticism, 
and they were accepted, or rather acclaimed 
by the reading public with that good judgment 
which it not infrequently evinces in literary 



ii2 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

matters, and have ever since retained the 
high position that was accorded them on their 
first appearance. 

These papers did much to keep the Atlantic 
Monthly floating at a time of great depression, 
when most people looked carefully at a twenty- 
five cent, piece before investing it in a current 
periodical. 

Simultaneous with the appearance of the 
Atlantic Monthly, and perhaps arising out of 
it, there sprang up the Saturday Club, which 
included among its members most of the 
contributors to the Atlantic, and some notable 
men besides. Holmes was the best asset of 
his publishers, and he became the most honoured 
presence at the Club meetings, and in return 
he attached immense prestige to this gathering, 
comparing it to the famous knot of literary 
men who met together in the eighteenth 
century, and calling Parker's Hotel which they 
frequented, the Will's Coffee-house of Boston. 

Outside the sacred penetralia which were 
shut within his own front door, nothing else 
in Dr. Holmes' life gave him so much pleasure 
as did this club. He loved it ; he hugged 
the thought of it ; and if Boston was to him 
the hub of the Universe, the club was certainly 
the hub of Boston. 

There is something a little tender about his 
disproportionate view of this gathering, but 



The Professor. 113 

it certainly claimed among its members the 
most notable literary men of America — 
Emerson, Hawthorne, Motley, Lowell, Whittier, 
Longfellow — these are but a few of those who 
met together ; but Dr. Holmes was the only 
one who went quite regularly, and continued 
to go until the company " was more of ghosts 
than of flesh and blood " to him. 

"I carry a stranger there now and then," he writes 
in 1 883, " and introduce him to the members who happen 
to be there, and then say — ' There at the end used to sit 
Agassiz — here at this end Longfellow — Emerson used to 
be there, and Lowell often next him ' " 

It was at the Club, if we could have met 
him there, that we should have heard him rival 
his own published works. He was a brilliant 
conversationalist, and his nimble wit, and 
full mind and gracious manner readily secured 
him the hearing of all his confreres, and even 
their forbearance when he monopolised the 
talk, as was sometimes the case, for one who 
had listened to many famous talkers and 
confessed that Holmes and Lowell were the most 
brilliant of them all, had to admit that he had 
not learned the London art of repression ; 
and Dr. Holmes was aware that he had a 
tendency to do more than his share, for in 
speaking of a man he had met at the Club, 
he complains that he was a great talker, and 
made it necessary for others to watch for their 



ii4 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

innings ; " but," he adds slyly, " I guess he 
has to, once in a while, for I have a tendency 
myself to loquacity/' 

But all who heard him were willing to give 
him precedence. He was not a great talker, 
in the vulgar sense, but a great conversationa- 
list, and we can gather from his books that he 
conceived very highly of conversation, and 
was one of the few who regarded it as a fine 
art. At the Club he found a fitting audience, 
and a large part of his influence during his 
life- time may be well attributed to his brilliant 
powers in this direction. 

A few quotations will show what importance 
he attached to conversation, and in what light 
he regarded it : — 

" Remember," he says, " that talking is one of the 
fine arts, the noblest, the most important and the most 
difficult, and that its fluent harmonies may be spoiled 
by the intrusion of a single harsh note. Therefore 
conversation which is suggestive rather than argumenta- 
tive, which lets out the most of each talker's results 
of thought, is commonly the pleasantest and the most 
profitable." 

And this passage contains a fine idea : — 

What are the great faults of conversation ? Want 
of ideas, want of words, want of manners. . . I don't 
doubt it, but I will tell you what I have found spoil more 
good conversation than anything else : long arguments 
on special points between people who differ on the 
fundamental principles upon which these points depend. 



The Professor. 115 

No men can have satisfactory relations with each other 
until they have agreed on certain ultimata of belief not 
to be disturbed in ordinary conversation. . . Talking 
is like playing on the harp ; there is as much in laying the 
hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging 
them to bring out their music. 

But although Oliver Wendell Holmes enjoyed 
and excelled in conversation, he considered 
himself a good listener. He says : — 

I won't deny that on rare occasions, when I have been 
in company with gentlemen who preferred listening, 
that I have been guilty of usurping the conversation ; 

but he goes on to say, 

If a man can tell me a fact which subtends an appre- 
ciable angle in the horizon of my thought, I am as 
receptive as the contribution -box in a congregation of 
coloured brethren. 

For all this declaration he was somewhat 
exacting as a listener, and was impatient of 
talkers with " jerky minds " who " say bright 
things on all possible subjects, but their zigzags 
rack you to death." 

" The business of conversation/ ' he says, " is a very 
serious matter. There are men that it weakens one to 
talk with an hour more than a day's fasting would do. 
It is better to lose a pint of blood from your veins than 
to have a nerve tapped.' ' 

But brilliant as his talk was, we have no 
record of it except in so far as he was his own 



n6 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

Boswell, and apart from this we have nothing 
preserved but the tradition of his brilliance 
and a few legendary stories. 

Dr. Holmes' growing reputation made him 
the subject of a large correspondence. 

Poverty comes pleading, not for charity for the most 
part, but imploring us to find a purchaser for its unmarket- 
able wares. The unreadable author particularly requests 
us to make a critical examination of his book — as if he 
wanted anything else but our praise. 

But he treated all his correspondents with 
wonderful charity and helpfulness, even the 
host of literary mediocrities and the authors 
or authoresses who sent the slim volumes of 
verses to him. 

Those attenuated volumes of poetry in fancy bindings 
open their covers at one like so many little unfledged 
birds, and one does so long to drop a worm in — a 
worm in the shape of a kind, soft word for the poor 
fledgling. 

He no doubt gave more praise than was 
deserved out of pure good nature, but our in- 
terest in the correspondence which Dr. Holmes' 
reputation thrust him into is not because 
it deepens our admiration of his charity and 
kindly nature, but because it indicates his 
good judgment and critical ability, although 
he never would allow himself to undertake 
the work of a professional critic, because he did 
so hate blaming and love praising. An instance 



The Professor. 117 

of his discernment is afforded by this story 
relating to one of his correspondents : — 

He one day answered an anonymous letter 
he had received, asking his opinion of some 
verses that were enclosed, to which he replied 
by way of encouraging his unknown corres- 
pondent, and promptly forgot the matter. 
Years later a man called upon him and reminded 
him of the circumstance, and introduced himself 
as the writer of the anonymous letter — Bret 
Harte. 

He perhaps was no more plagued with 
unknown correspondents and lion-hunters than 
other men of reputation, but he accepted his 
" crosses " with more humour than others, 
and when asked one day how he felt when quite 
a number of people had made it their business 
to visit him, he replied, " Like a young elephant 
at the Zoo with a cheap excursion party on its 
back." 

He was terribly pestered by autograph 
seekers and beggars of all description, but his 
charity to all his correspondents, and his 
desire that no one's feelings should be hurt, 
and no opportunity overlooked that would 
allow him to be of service, increased the burden 
immensely. 

From what my correspondents tell me I must infer 
that I have established a dangerous reputation for 
willingness to answer all sorts of letters, 



n8 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

he says, and the strain became too great to be 
borne in later life. 

Writing when he was eighty years old, he 

says : — 

It has occurred to me that it might be profitable to 
reproduce some of my unwritten answers, 

and proceeds, 

Want my autograph, do you ? And don't know how 
to spell my name ? An a for an e in my middle name. 

Think the lines you mention are by far the best I 
ever wrote, hey ? Well, I didn't write those lines. What 
is more I think they are as detestable a string of rhymes 
as I could wish my worst enemy . . . 

but he never did reply in any but a genial 
way. 

His treatment of those who bothered him 
with their troubles or aspirations or require- 
ments was kindly to an almost excessive 
degree, but it was because he adopted this 
attitude towards all that he was able to be 
more useful to a larger number of people than 
any other man of letters at his time. But his 
correspondence was not all of this troublesome 
character, and he received innumerable letters 
of appreciation to which he was very susceptible. 
To this class of his unknown friends he writes : — 

Be assured that a writer is always rendered happier 
by being told that he has made a fellow-being wiser 
or better, or even contributed to his harmless enter- 
taniment. 



The Professor. 119 

This trial of an author's life, as it is called, 
is referred to here because it commenced for 
Dr. Holmes with the publication of the 
" Autocrat/' and went on increasing until the 
day of his death ; and not only allowed him 
opportunities of exercising his too-ready charity, 
but owing to the intimacy which he so quickly 
establishes between himself and his readers, 
his correspondents were apt to take him into 
their confidence in a more than ordinary degree 
which deepened his experience of life and 
evoked his sympathy and developed his nature 
in many ways. 

The " Professor " followed on the heels of 
the " Autocrat/' and what has been said with 
regard to that book applies to the papers that 
ran through the Atlantic under the title of the 
u Professor of the Breakfast Table." 

The " Professor " occupied the same chair 
as the " Autocrat/' but he was a somewhat 
more ponderous figure. He discoursed of more 
serious subjects in a more serious way : — 

The Professor was more outspoken on religious subjects, 
and brought down a great deal of hard language on 
himself and the author to whom he owed his existence. 
I suppose he may have used some irritating expressions 
unconsciously but not unconscientiously I am sure. 

So writes Oliver Wendell Holmes long after- 
wards, and in speaking of the preference of 
some for the " Professor," he says : — 



120 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

I confess that I prefer my champagne in its first burst 
of gaseous enthusiasm, but if my guest likes it better 
after it has stood awhile, I am pleased to accommodate 
him. The first series came from my mind almost 
with an explosion. . . It startled me a little to 
see what I had written, and to hear what people said 
about it." 

And most of us are of the author's opinion. 

James Russell Lowell, however, said with 
respect to the " Professor/' that Dr. Holmes 
was getting his second wind, which has been 
taken to mean that he preferred the second 
series ; but he probably inferred that the 
" Professor " had settled down to a style and 
pace that had more staying power than the 
first swift measure. 

Some of the opinions of the " Professor " 
may be noticed when we speak of Dr. Holmes' 
attitude to religion ; but it remains to be said 
here that one character in the book — that of 
" Little Boston " — is memorable, and is prob- 
ably the best of all the characters in the Break- 
fast Table series. Dr. Holmes improved in 
character drawing as he went on, and could 
really depict character well, although he never 
developed any considerable constructive ability 
in this series, or when he came to write his 
novels. 

It is well to note before leaving the " Pro- 
fessor " that if the book is not such a literary 
wonder as its predecessor, not so sparkling, 



The Professor. 121 

so fresh, so audacious, yet it reveals the fact 
that a larger part of the author's nature had 
been baptised into experience, and there is 
often something arresting both in the style 
and the matter that we do not find in the 
" Autocrat." 

Take this passage, for instance : — 

Riding along over a rocky road suddenly the slow 
monotonous grinding of the crushing gravel changes to a 
deep heavy rumble. There is a great hollow under your 
feet, a huge, unsunned cavern. Deep, deep, beneath 
you it arches its awful vault, and far away it stretches 
its winding galleries, their roofs dripping into streams 
where fishes have been swimming and spawning in the 
dark until their scales are white as milk, and their eyes 
have withered out — obsolete and useless. 

So it is in life. We jog quietly along, meeting the same 
faces, grinding over the same thoughts, now and then 
jarring against an obstacle we cannot crush, sometimes 
bringing up short against a disappointment, but still 
working along the creaking and rattling and grating and 
jerking that belong to the journey of life. . . Suddenly 
we hear the deep underground reverberation that reveals 
the unsuspected depth of some abyss of thought or passion 
beneath us. 

The " Poet " appeared eleven years later, 
but may be mentioned here. 

" This series was not so much a continuation 
as a resurrection," says Dr. Holmes, and it 
is its richness in poetic reminiscence that 
alone makes the " Poet " worthy to stand 
beside the companion volumes. It has been 



122 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

likened to wine from the third pressing of grapes 
of a wonderful growth, and the simile is a good 
one. Dr. Holmes wrote the book to please 
himself, he tells us, and to say some things that 
he would be the better for getting rid of ; but 
its chief interest for us to-day is found in the 
haunting chapter on his boyhood, and the 
wistful glances he turns toward the past. 

All three of these books were set with poems 
as with jewels, but those contained in the 
" Autocrat " are easily the best, and in fact 
there can be little doubt that the "Autocrat " 
contains the best things Oliver Wendell Holmes 
had to say ; and, as the " Professor " wittily 
hints, it was a question as to whether there 
was anything left for him to suck out of creation 
after his lively friend had had his straw in the 
bung-hole of the Universe. 

Once more, late in life, when he had arrived 
at three-score-and-twenty, as he used to say, 
he returned to the conversational style of his 
earlier works, and wrote the series of papers 
entitled " Over the Tea-cups/' His own 
uncertainty about these papers, and his almost 
touching anxiety that they might be found 
worth reading, is sufficient indication that we 
need not look for anything comparable to his 
brilliant challenge to the literary world. 

" I know," he says, " that it is a hazardous experiment 
to address myself again to a public which in days long 



The Professor. 123 

past has given me a gracious welcome, and some will 
say he has had his day ; why can't he be content ? " 

He reminds his readers that the morning 
cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which 
the cheering influence of the afternoon or 
evening cup of tea cannot be expected to 
reproduce, and he advises them not to compare 
the quiet talks over the tea-table to the early 
and vigorous conversation across the breakfast 
table. 

Comparison, however, was bound to be 
instituted, and " Over the Tea-cups " must 
take a minor place among the works of Oliver 
Wendell Holmes. It is far, however, from 
being uninteresting or unreadable ; it is one 
of those sedative books which old people will 
perhaps even prefer to the mentally exciting 
pages which he wrote in mid life. The papers 
contain an old man's reflections on every phase 
of life that has come within his experience. 
He discourses in a quiet but cheery way of 
music, — of art, — of doctors and architects, 
— of war and religion, — of realism in literature 
and life, — of his correspondence, and his fame, 
and his old age. The book is rich in charity 
and the wisdom which comes of charity, and 
free from that lachrymose tendency which 
may so easily spoil an old man's musings. 

Humour and vivacity gleam and sparkle 
among the pages, but it is only in the " Broom- 



124 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

stick Train " that the old spirit flashes out as 
though to defy the increasing years. This 
remarkable poem is particularly noteworthy 
as the work of one so advanced in age, but 
it is what we might have expected of him in 
his earlier days, and it may be better to give 
a quotation that is chosen from among many 
similar passages, and which indicates the differ- 
ence in temper between his earlier and later 
work. The satire is not so pointed, nor the 
humour so pungent, and what was wistful 
in the " Poet of the Breakfast Table" has 
become very tender in this book : — 

All reflecting persons, even those whose minds have 
been half palsied by the deadly dogmas which have done 
all they could to disorganise their thinking powers — all 
reflecting persons must recognise in looking back over a 
long life how largely their creeds, their course of life, their 
wisdom and unwisdom, their whole characters were 
shaped by the conditions which surround them. 

Little children they come from the hands of the 
Father of all ; little children, in their helplessness, their 
ignorance, they are going back to Him. They cannot 
help feeling that they are to be transferred from the rude 
embrace of the boisterous elements to arms that will 
receive them tenderly. 



CHAPTER VII. 

NOVELIST. 

Can the Infinite be supposed to shift the responsibility 
of the ultimate destiny of any created thing to the finite ? 
I doubt. — Master Byles Gridley. 

" Q*OME of you boarders ask me," says the " Auto- 
>Z3 crat," " why I don't write a story or a novel 
or something of that kind. That every articulately 
speaking human being has in him stuff for one novel in 
three volumes duodecimo has long been with me a 
cherished belief. All which proves that I as an individual 
of the human family could write one novel or story at any 
rate, if I would. 

" Why don't I then ? . . I have sometimes thought 
it possible that I might be too dull to write such a story 
as I should wish to write. And, finally, I think it very 
likely I shall write a story one of these days." 

From this remark, and even from the form 
and the characters of the " Autocrat " and 
the " Professor/' the reader might have antici- 
pated that these papers would be followed by 
a novel. 

Not even the genius of Oliver Wendell Holmes 
could support a writer through a number of 
works if he continued to adopt the literary 
form of the " Autocrat," and he probably 

125 



126 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

had the wisdom to see that a change (of form) 
was desirable, as well as the ambition to write 
something more constructive. 

" The Professor's Story " — or " Elsie 
Venner " — as it is now called, began to appear 
in the Atlantic Monthly in i860, and at once 
brought down a shower of criticism from 
all classes and conditions of men. 

Much of the criticism which the book received, 
as a work of art, must be repeated to-day, but 
the strictures of theologians and preachers can, 
almost without exception, be happily forgotten. 

The first criticism the book suggests, and 
it is one that has been passed by many, is that 
the work is not organic, — there is no vital 
interplay between the various characters. These 
characters are sometimes well, and sometimes 
excellently drawn, but they stand alone as 
figures and buttresses and pillars that have 
not yet been built into a house. 

A graver objection to some is that " Elsie 
Venner " is a novel with a purpose, or perhaps 
a novel of one idea, where almost every charac- 
ter is a little warped because of the author's 
determination to make each one the means, 
not of developing the other characters, but 
of forwarding the one idea of the book. 

The digressive and discursive style, too, 
detracts from the merit of " Elsie Venner " 
— so suitable a medium for conveying the 



Novelist. 127 

M Autocrat's " mind to his readers, it is not 
a good instrument for heightening or develop- 
ing a tragedy. But for all this the book was 
hailed and is still accepted as a remarkable 
one, and is still worth reading, not only for the 
story, not only because it is the challenge 
of a great humanitarian to an atrocious doctrine, 
but also because its pages are full of a genial 
wisdom, and contain so much that is character- 
istic of the author, and by which we know his 
work. 

One can recognise the " Autocrat's " humour 
in the treatment of the concerns of the Sprowdle 
family ; his benignity shines in the face of 
Doctor Kerridge, who drives Dick Venner 
forty miles out of the parish after his mean 
and dastardly attempt upon the life of Bernard 
Langdon, and sends him on his way not with 
a curse, but with fatherly emotion, and almost 
with a blessing. One is at home with Dr. 
Honeywood, whose kindly nature must needs 
ameliorate his creed, before he can apply it 
to the specific lives and actions of his 
parishioners. 

One recognises the author's predilection 
for the neat, athletic man in the gusto with 
which he tells of Bernard Langdon's manage- 
ment of the hulking butcher, who had been 
more than a match for his former master ; 
and one recollects Dr. Holmes' pride at having 



128 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

seen " Plenipotentiary " win the Derby, and 
his love of his profession because, among other 
things, it compelled him to keep a horse, in 
the description of the doctor's mare, Cassia, 
and the famous description of Major Ro wen's 
knowledge of horses. " He knew a neat, snug 
hoof, a delicate pastern, a broad haunch, 
a deep chest, a close-ribbed up barrel. . . . 
He was not to be taken in by your thick 
jointed, heavy-headed cattle without any go 
in them." 

But these are minor, although interesting, 
characteristics. The author had one purpose 
in writing " Elsie Venner," and in order to 
speak of that it is necessary very briefly to 
indicate the story. 

The first character we are introduced to is 
Bernard Langdon, who is a principal figure 
during the whole of the story. He is a medical 
student who finds himself unable to continue 
his study on account of the decline of the 
family fortune, and applies to his professor 
for a certificate of qualification, in order to 
enable him to obtain an appointment as a 
schoolmaster. He is a character Kingsley 
would have enjoyed — keen, intellectually and 
physically fit, with all the natural instincts 
well- developed, and all under excellent control. 
Dr. Holmes was fond of his hero, and spared no 
pains in developing his character. 



Novelist. 129 

Bernard Langdon discharges his duties so 
well at one school that he soon finds the way 
open to a better appointment at the Apollinian 
Institute for Girls at Rocklands, where the 
interest of the story centres. 

Here we are introduced to Helen Darley 
— one of the assistant teachers, and one of those 
gentle women who go about the world sacrificing 
themselves to their sense of duty — and to 
Silas Peckham, the principal — a detestable 
man, mean in his economies, mean in his 
generosities, and in all his relationships. 

It is at this school that we meet Elsie Venner 
— the heroine of the story if she may be called 
so — a girl of eighteen, with more than beauty 
enough to make her attractive, but with other 
attributes sufficiently indicated in the story 
to make her, not repulsive, but a weird and 
fearful fascination . 

Elsie is the daughter and only child of 
Dudley Venner — a gloomy and troubled shadow 
moving through the story — whose wife had 
died in giving birth to her. 

The mother had fatally endowed her child 
before its birth, as she had been bitten a short 
time previously by one of the rattlesnakes 
that haunted the ledges of the mountains 
close to Dudley Mansion. 

No one knows the reason for Elsie's strange 
influence and ungovernable moods but her 



130 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

father, and old Sophy, the nurse, and the 
doctor, and these three do their utmost to 
protect her from fatal mischance. 

Elsie herself is only dimly aware of the 
impassable gulf which separates her from real 
intimacy with other people, and as, towards 
the end of the story, the lower nature begins 
to die and she begins to feel the separation 
more deeply, she becomes an intensely pathetic 
figure. 

From our first introduction in the following 
quotation, to the end of the story, the 
mystery of her personality is suggested by the 
most subtle touches. Everything about the 
girl, her habits, her dress, her hair, her instincts, 
her influence — are suggestive of something 
abnormal and haunting : — 

She was a splendid, scowling beauty ; black-browed, 
with a flash of white teeth which was always like a surprise 
when her lips par bed. She wore a chequered dress of a 
curious pattern, and a camel's hair scarf twisted a little 
fantastically about her. She went to her seat — and 
sitting down began playing listlessly with her gold chain, 
coiling and uncoiling it about her slender wrist, and 
braiding it in with her long delicate fingers. Presently 
she looked up. Black, piercing eyes, not large — a low 
forehead, as low as that of Clytie in the Townley bust, — 
black hair twisted in heavy braids, a face that one could 
not help looking at for its beauty, yet that one wanted to 
look away from for something in its expression, and could 
not for those diamond eyes. 



Novelist. 131 

The description is heightened as the story 
progresses by such a touch as this : — 

What was the slight peculiarity of her enunciation ? 
Not a lisp, certainly ; but the least possible imperfection 
in articulating some of the Ungual sounds. 

And such suggestive sentences as the following : 

She threw her head back ; her eyes narrowed and her 
forehead drawn down, so that Dick thought her head 
actually flattened itself. 

Her habit of wandering unharmed among 
the haunts of the crotalus, and her paralysing 
influence upon people, especially Helen Darley, 
are insisted upon to haunt the mind with the 
ophidian characteristics of the beautiful girl. 

She falls in love with Bernard Langdon, 
and he can only offer her friendship. She 
dies just as it seems that the serpent nature 
was about to surrender to the higher element 
of her being. This work has been called a 
" medicated " novel, and Dr. Holmes says 
it is a medicated novel, so that anyone who 
wishes to read for mere amusement need not 
trouble himself with a story written with a 
different end in view. 

The origin of the story was a physiological 
conception fertilised by a theological idea ; 
and was written with the object of testing the 
doctrine of original sin, and of inquiring whether 
Elsie Venner, poisoned by the venom of a 



132 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

crotalus before she was born, was morally 
responsible, and of insisting upon the author's 
belief that she was the proper object of Divine 
pity, and not of Divine wrath. 

But this was not all that Dr. Holmes intended. 
He was pretty certain of obtaining the reader's 
pity and absolution, — if these were required — 
for his heroine ; but he leads us on to the larger 
consideration, and asks the more important 
question as to whether there was any difference 
between her position at the bar of judgment 
— human and divine — and that of the unfor- 
tunate victim who received a moral poison 
from a remote ancestor before he drew his first 
breath. 

This was the rock of offence to many of his 
contemporaries — his insistence upon the fact 
that inherited predispositions limit the sphere 
of the will and of moral accountability, and his 
plea that bad men should be treated as if 
they were insane — they are insane, out of 
health morally, he says. 

All this is familiar to us to-day, and few will 
take offence at anything he said in his desire 
to humanise theology, which, he said, in writing 
to James Freeman Clarke, " has been largely 
diabology." 

But his critics and his friends were ready 
to take alarm and express disapprobation of 
his " dangerous theory/' especially as it 



Novelist. 133 

developed their own responsibility in a some- 
what startling manner. 

What if you are drinking a little too much wine and 
smoking a little too much tobacco, and your son takes 
after you and so your poor grandson's brain being a 
little injured in physical texture, he loses the fine moral 
sense in which you pride yourself, and doesn't see the 
difference between signing another man's name to a 
draft, and his own ? 

Dr. Holmes received the somewhat abusive 
criticism he was subject to without feeling 
any desire to retaliate. " Elsie Venner " was 
more than a novel : it was one of "the instru- 
ments he used to prosecute what was possibly 
the greatest purpose of his life, — " to make 
men charitable and soften legal and theological 
barbarism. " 

-His purpose has been partly fulfilled, and 
he certainly contributed to effect it ; but it 
must be remembered that the ages were 
working with him, and have still much to do. 

It cannot be denied that this book, and, 
in fact, Oliver Wendell Holmes' work as a 
whole, has more than a tendency to break 
down the sense of individual responsibility, 
and it is a question whether Dick Venner 
should have been sent off with money and 
a blessing ; and other characters and phases 
of character are treated with a like indulgence 
which one may call excessive without being 



134 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

open to the charge of narrowness or harshness. 

Dr. Holmes did not believe in the responsi- 
bility of idiots. " He did not believe new-born 
babes were morally answerable for other 
people's acts ; he thought a man with a crooked 
spine would never be called to account for not 
walking straight ; he thought if the crook 
was in the brain instead of in the back he could 
not fairly be blamed for any consequence 
of this natural defect, whatever lawyers and 
doctors might call it/ 1 and he preferred to teach 
men the charity that might sometimes let the 
guilty go unpunished rather than that they 
should rest in a creed that had often erred on 
the other side, and tended to dehumanise. 

Dr. Holmes lived long enough to hear his 
books spoken of without vituperation, and to 
see many of the lessons that he taught influence 
his own generation, and accepted by a younger. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

"the guardian angel." 

" There is nothing so important as the cultivation of 
of a high sense of personal responsibility, unless it be 
to recognise the limits of individual responsibility in 
our judgments of others." 

T^R. HOLMES' painstaking research previous 
■^ to writing " Elsie Venner " illustrates 
the care and labour with which he wrote all his 
books. He did not write anything in an 
off-handed and easy manner, although a casual 
reading of some of his work might suggest 
that he did so. 

Before commencing to write his first novel, 
" he explored all printed knowledge concerning 
the reptiles and their venom." He drew upon 
his friend, Dr. Weir Mitchell, who knew all 
there was to be known about the rattle-snake, 
and he made himself familiar with all the 
legendary and authentic stories of those who 
inherited the serpent nature in some degree. 

135 



136 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

In addition to this, he was so anxious not 
to fail in making his character impart to 
the reader a sufficiently true and haunting 
sensation of her fatal endowment, that he 
procured a rattle-snake, which he kept at the 
• Medical School for some months, and which 
he constantly and carefully observed. 

He was as exacting in the production of 
all his works. Mr. Morse says : — " Not only 
when he dwelt upon, but when he even alluded 
to any topic whatever, whether in the way of 
science, or history, or argument, or idea, or of 
literary or theological discussion — whatever 
it might be — he made sure by minute investi- 
gation that his knowledge was thorough, 
and that his use and treatment were correct/ ' 
Even when preparing an article on Jonathan 
Edwards, a man whose life and work he had 
► been studying for years previously, he made 
volumes of notes, and referred to every well- 
known writer before setting pen to paper. 

Dr. Holmes recreated himself from the 
exacting labour which his medical lectures 
and his literary work required of him during 
these years, with hobbies and interests of all 
kinds. He was an expert oarsman, and loved 
the long, sharp-pointed boats. He was keenly 
interested in horses, and was fond of all outdoor 
exercises. His walks were made doubly enjoy- 
able by his photography — at which he was a 



"The Guardian Angel." 137 

proficient — and his love of trees which he would 
fondly measure. He says : — 

I want you to understand, in the first place, that I 
have a most intense, passionate fondness for trees in 
general, and have had several romantic attachments to 
certain trees in particular. Now, if you expect me to 
hold forth in a " scientific way " about my tree loves 
you are an anserine individual, and I must refer you to a 
dull friend who will discourse to you of such matters. 

His leisure at home he spent with his micro- 
scope, or interested himself in the application 
of his scientific knowledge to some popular 
end, as in the stethoscope, and at one period 
he spent a good deal of time in a vain attempt 
to learn the violin. 

He was a man who valued himself, and 
husbanded his strength both of mind and 
body. He never worked so desperately as to 
be unfit for work for a time, nor recreated him- 
self to such an extent as to make his return 
to work unpalatable ; body and mind helped 
each other, and he was able to turn his recreation 
to some literary account, as in those popular 
scientific articles whch he wrote on the stetho- 
scope and the daguerrotype, which have been 
republished in " Soundings in the Atlantic." 

Five years after the appearance of " Elsie 
Vernier," he published his second" medicated" 
novel under the title of " The Guardian 
Angel." This book never created the same 

10 



138 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

interest as the earlier work, probably because 
it never excited such antagonism ; but it 
is a more consistent work of art, and as a 

y literary production, it must take the first 
place among his novels. 

The author's protest " against the scholastic 
tendency to shift the total responsibility of all 

v human action from the infinite to the finite " 
is not so urgent and not so inartistically 
obtruded upon the reader ; he has more in 
mind those readers who prefer to skip the 
" Morals " in iEsop's Fables, and who read a 
work of fiction for the story, without interesting 
themselves very much in the psychological 

*" problem that the author has made it his business 
to suggest. The book abounds in arresting 
sentences and illustrations, such as the 
following : — 

It is not in the words that others say to us, but in 
those other words which these make us say to ourselves 
that we find our gravest lesson and our sharpest rebuke. 

It offers plenty of proof of the author's 
aptitude in expressing commonplace thought 
in an uncommon and striking manner : — 

To know whether a minister young or still in flower 
is in safe or dangerous paths there are two psychometers. 
The first is the black broadcloth forming the knees of his 
pantaloons, the second the patch of carpet before his 
mirror. If the first is unworn and the second is frayed 
and threadbare, pray for him. If the first is worn and 



" The Guardian Angel." 139 

shiny while the second keeps its pattern and texture, 
get him to pray for you. 

The story itself has the advantage over 
its predecessor of being more probable, and 
the characters are drawn not only by a more 
practised hand, but with more fidelity to %^' 
human life. Nothing could be better than 
the character of Byles Gridley on the one 
hand, and the cold and calculating egotism 
of Murray Bradshaw on the other ; and the 
characters are handled with such skill in some 
chapters as to make the pictures of New 
England life in the early part of the nineteenth 
century not only faithful, but sufficiently 
excellent from an artistic point of view as to 
bear comparison with similar sketches to be 
found in the work of Jane Austin and Miss 
Mitford. This novel, of which Myrtle Hazard w 
is the most important character, has not the 
tragic and even repulsive elements of " Elsie 
Venner," although like the earlier work, it 
depends upon the pre-natal history of thev* 
heroine for its deeper significance. 

It is a study in heredity, and aims at showing 
that our individual personality is by no means 
the single inhabitant of our bodies, but that 
our ancestors may enjoy a somewhat shadowy 
but real and self-conscious existence in our 
bodily tenement ; and further still, that they 
may affect the course of our lives without our 



140 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

being able to control this subtle determination, 
and therefore mitigate to a certain extent our 
individual responsibility. 

Dr. Holmes was mindful of the abuse and 
misinterpretation he received at the hands 
of the critics after the publication of " Elsie 
Vernier/' and said now:— 

Should any professional alarmist choose to confound 
the doctrine of limited responsibility with that which 
denies the existence of any self-determining power, he 
may be presumed to belong to the class of intellectual 
half-breeds, wearing the garb of civilisation and even the 
gown of scholarship. If we cannot follow the automatic 
machinery of nature into the mental and moral world, 
where it plays its part as much as in the bodily function, 
without being accused of " laying all that we are evil in 
to a divine thrusting on" we had better return at once 
to our old demonology. 

The problem of the story is stated clearly 
in an early chapter, in which the author speaks 
of Myrtle's antecedents. 

The instincts and qualities belonging to the ancestral 
traits which predominated in the conflict of mingled 
lives, lay in this child in embryo, waiting to come to 
maturity. Her earlier impulses may have been derived 
directly from her father and mother, but all the ancestors 
who have been mentioned and more or less obscurely many 
others came uppermost in their turn before the absolute 
and total result of their several forces had found its 
equilibrium in the character by which she was to be 
known as an individual. . . The world, the flesh, the 
devil held mortgages on her life before its deed was put 



"The Guardian Angel." 141 

into her hand, but sweet and gracious influences were 
also born with her and the battle of life was to be fought 
between them, God helping her in her need and her own 
free choice siding with one or the other. 

And the same idea is practically suggested 
in Myrtle Hazard's vision, where she sees the 
figures of her ancestors and herself among 
them. They seem to be saying, " Breath ! 
breath !" they each want to give expression 
to themselves and to work out their will through 
her young life. There was her father and 
mother among the shadows, a little more 
palpable than the rest ; the hard-drinking 
and hearty Major, who had something about 
his life that Myrtle did not want to make a 
part of her's, but who seemed to have a kind 
of right in her, which compelled her to take 
what was left of his life in that shadow-like 
shape, and allow it a place in her being ; there 
was the wild woman with the Indian blood in her 
veins, and a head-dress of feathers : " she kept 
as it were in the shadow, and I saw something 
of my own features in her face " ; and there 
was Ruth Bradford, one of the guardian angels. 

These all became part of her, and were lost 
in her own life as she returned from the strange 
and dreamy condition she had fallen into. 

It was such a complex character as Myrtle 
Hazard that Dr. Holmes created for his purpose, 
and the chief interest of the story, and perhaps 



142 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

the chief end of the author in writing it lies 
in the subtle characterisation of Myrtle as now 
the distinguishing traits of one ancestor, and 
now those of another seem to dominate her 
personality. The story is so well wrought 
that during different phases of Myrtle's life, 
we see without effort and without shock, the 
hint of another personality in her glance and 
her bearing, and another will determining her 
actions ; especially is this the case in that 
dramatic incident of the tableaux, when Myrtle 
is dressed as an Indian woman to play the part 
of Pocahantas : — 

It was a strange feeling that came over Myrtle. Had 
she never worn that painted robe before ? Was it the 
first time that these strings of wampum had ever rattled 
upon her neck and arms ? And could it be that the 
plume of eagles' feathers with which they crowned her 
dark lengthening locks had never shadowed her forehead 
until now. She felt herself carried back into the dim 
ages when the wilderness was untrodden save by the feet 
of its native lords. Think of her wild fancy as we may, 
she felt as if that dusky woman of her midnight vision 
were breathing for one hour through her lips. 

So at other times it is her ancestor, Judith 
Pride, who looks through Myrtle's eyes and 
stands confessed in her dignified carriage, and 
determines the issue of the moment ; or the 
martyr and guardian spirit of Anne Holyoake, 
or another of the dim and shadowy figures 
of her vision. 



"The Guardian Angel." 143 

All through the story, from the moment 
we are introduced to the wayward child whose 
will cannot be broken by Silence Withers, to 
the end when love, in the person of Clement 
Lindsay, evokes her settled personality, — the 
life of Myrtle Hazard is the centre of a conflict 
between many individualities, each eager to 
claim a right in her life and to order her actions ; 
but she has two guardians angels in Anne 
Radford, her martyred ancestor, and Master 
Gridley, whose presence relieves every tense 
moment in the story. 

The characters in " The Guardian Angel " 
hang together in a way that contrasts favourably 
with the more or less detached characters in 
the earlier novel, and the serious purpose of the 
author is not so needlessly emphasised nor 
expressed in such a manner as to excite antagon- 
ism ; on the other hand we are distinctly made 
to feel that had circumstances been a little 
different, and had Myrtle committed herself 
in consequence to a course of life and actions 
that are not usually condoned, we should 
not have been able to charge her with the whole 
responsibility, but should have been obliged 
to call up the dead to bear the burden. 

In all his works, Dr Holmes carries his 
readers to the borderland of science and the 
theory of the limitation of human responsibility, 
which has found such a large acceptance during 



144 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

recent years, owes a great deal to his sym- 
pathetic and urgent exposition ; but it is 
well to remember that the idea remains a theory 
beyond a certain point, and that he attempted 
to carry it to a far greater length than science 
gave him sanction. In his anxiety to humanise 
theology and to teach men charity, he drew 
inferences from his scientific knowledge and 
his observation that do not bear a close scrutiny 
to-day. 

When he was seventy-five years of age, Dr. 
Holmes attempted a third novel, which owed 
its origin, as did the preceding ones, to his 
obsession by the ideas that have been spoken 
about. 

" A Mortal Antipathy " is a problem novel 
that has for its hero the rather absurd Maurice 
Kirkwood. During his babyhood Maurice 
receives a hurt by falling from the arms of his 
girl cousin, which is made accountable for 
his antipathy to young girls. He never could 
bear the sight of them, until he was rescued 
from a burning house, where he was alone upon 
a sick bed, by Euthymia, and saved not only 
from death but from his antipathy, by virtue 
of the nature of his deliverance and the sex 
of his deliverer. 

The story is dull, and in fact absurd in parts ; 
the creative impulse of the author, never very 
strong, was flagging, and although the idea of 



"The Guardian Angel/' 145 

the story is not an altogether improbable one, 
and was buttressed up with scientific evidence, 
it was beyond the author's declining powers 
to make it interesting, and contains a good deal 
that is tedious and not relevant to the story. 
Such names as the Terror, the Wonder, and 
the Enigma, do not attract, and all three of the 
characters that Dr. Holmes lent these names 
to are poor and in fact worse than poor when 
we compare them with his earlier work. Dr. 
Holmes himself had misgivings about this 
last novel of his, and writing to a friend who 
had read it and had been able to congratulate 
the author, he says : — 

" I was thankful to think that it pleased you. I had 
no exalted anticipations about it ; in fact, I was a 
little afraid that it would be scouted altogether beyond 
the bounds of credibility. ,, 

Dr. Holmes rather congratulated himself 
that no critic had accused him of writing an 
improbable story, and took to himself a little 
more consolation from this fact than the 
critics would have allowed him. The proba- 
bility or improbability of a story is, after all, 
of comparatively slight importance in estimating 
a book that makes claim to be a work of art, 
and there were graver faults for the critics to 
concern themselves with. 

The book, however, claims attention when 
one is speaking of his work as a whole, because 



146 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

it further emphasises the serious purpose he 
had in view in writing his books generally, 
and his novels in particular. Nothing can 
give us so true and even impressive a sense 
of his attitude to his work as this quotation 
from a letter addressed to Mrs. H. B. Stow, 
in which he speaks of " Elsie Venner " on 
which he was engaged at the time: — 

" I wish," he says, " to write a story with enough 
of interest in its characters and incidents to attract 
a certain amount of popular attention. Under cover 
of this to stir that mighty question of automatic agency 
in its relation to self-determination. . . . It is 
conceived in the fear of God and in the love of man. 
Whether I am able to work out my delicate and difficult 
problem or not is not of so much consequence. A 
man may fulfil the object of his existence by asking 
a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task 
he cannot achieve/' 

Before leaving the consideration of the 
novels, it may be worth while to mention one 
trifling detail which illustrates the way in which 
Dr. Holmes so often used his professional 
knowledge, to heighten the effect of the charac- 
ters and incidents of his stories. It will be 
remembered that " Elsie Venner " had a mark 
upon her neck which she kept carefully covered 
up ; in reading the story we refer this mark, in 
our mind, to the bite of the snake, and as the 
story and the life of Elsie progress toward an 
end, the mark grows fainter as the serpent 



" The Guardian Angel." 147 

nature succumbs to the higher elements of 
Elsie's being, and at her death it is found that 
the fateful mark has completely faded away. 
It cannot be denied that the idea of " the 
mark " is a very subtle touch on the part 
of the author, or rather the way in which it is 
made suggestive, by being spoken of, and 
hinted at, and the effect which a knowledge 
of its presence has upon the heroine. And 
the complete fading away of the mark is also 
suggestive : it is more than that — it concludes 
the story, and without it the death of Elsie 
would be no satisfactory and full conclusion. 
A physiological explanation of this detail of 
the story has recently been given by Mr. Bland 
Sutton, who suggested that Dr. Holmes, being 
a medical man, would know how many people 
are disfigured by a naevus upon some part of 
their body, and he would also know that these 
blemishes depend upon the capillary circulation 
for their characteristic appearance, and might 
therefore grow faint in some conditions of 
health and be unapparent at death. It was 
this professional knowledge which Dr. Holmes 
was able to use in so effective a manner when 
he conceived " Elsie Venner," and all his books 
afford illustrations of the very skilful way the 
novelist, the essayist and the poet made use 
of the scientist and the medical man. 



CHAPTER IX. 

BIOGRAPHER AND TRAVELLER. 

We will not speak of years to-night, 
For what have years to bring 

But larger floods of love and light, 
And sweeter songs to sing ? 



We need not waste our schoolboy art 
To gild this notch of time. 

HPHE volumes that have been spoken of in 
A the preceding pages are not the only 
account that Dr. Holmes gave of himself during 
the years that are included between the appear- 
ance of the " Autocrat " and that of " A Mortal 
Antipathy." 

Once the " Autocrat " had laid the founda- 
tion of his reputation, he found himself in great 
demand. No notable gathering in Boston 
was complete without him, or without a poem 
from him, and poems* seemed to fly from his 
pen with a dangerous facility. " I have 
contributed my share of hilarity to scores of 
festivals," he says, " and am almost entitled 
to be called the laureate of our local receptions 
of great personages, from Prince Albert Edward 

148 



Biographer and Traveller. 149 

downward/' His friends and his good nature 
compelled him to grace all manner of public 
and private occasions with a copy of verses, 
and the wonder is that so many of these are 
worth reading by us, who feel no interest in 
the particular occasion of them. 

I have one trouble I cannot get rid of, namely, that 

they tease me to write for every conceivable anniversary. 

. You remember Sydney Smith's John Bull, 

how he " blubbers and subscribes " — I scold and consent. 

Many of these poems, perhaps too many, have 
been included in his collected works ; some of 
them are exceedingly apt, and all of them 
display his characteristic humour and geniality 
to some extent. 

He also contributed during these years a 
good many stray essays, both literary and 
scientific, to various magazines, and most of 
these that are worth remembrance may be 
found in the volumes entitled " Medical Essays/' 
" An Old Volume of Life," and " Soundings 
in the Atlantic." The last of these has not 
been reprinted, but the best contributions 
it contains form a part of the " Old Volume of 
Life." There is no need to speak of these 
essays at length, but they illustrate in a particu- 
lar way what has been noticed in speaking of 
Dr. Holmes' other works, the useful ally the 
scientist found the man of letters in the " Medical 
Essays," and the value of the professional 



150 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

knowledge and experience of the doctor to the 
author when he was writing of general subjects. 

These essays, however, are also interesting 
as displaying his versatility, and his keen 
observation, and they give us, — at least, some 
of them do, — a clearer understanding of his 
acutely logical mind than could be obtained 
from his more popular works. It is the recog- 
nition of this latter characteristic that is 
helpful in enabling us to see how it was that 
a man who seemed at times almost incapable 
of opposition, should yet have pursued, for so 
long a time and with such antipathy, some 
phases of belief and some developments of 
medical science. The " Medical Essays " 
contain some passages that are noteworthy 
by the general reader, and show not only the 
large and humane view he took of his own 
profession, but lead us to infer that his scientific 
training and professional experience is largely 
accountable for the calm, wise and tolerant 
attitude he adopted toward life in all its mani- 
testations. 

During the years he was living quietly 
at Boston and writing his books, he cemented 
many friendships. Lowell, Longfellow, Whit- 
tier, Emerson, Motley and James Freeman 
Clarke were among those he regarded as his 
especial friends, and with whom he deals 
intimately ; but in addition to the close and 



Biographer and Traveller. 151 

literary friendships which he made, he gathered 
round him a large circle of men and women 
who followed the most diverse callings, and were 
united only in their admiration of him. 

These acquaintances had such a high esteem 
for Dr. Holmes' powers that they were unable 
to rest contented with his literary work, and 
urged with some obtuseness that such talents 
as he possessed should be enlisted in the interest 
of various public services and aims. 

Lowell, to whom we owe a debt for having 
made Dr. Holmes aware of his literary powers, 
and for giving him confidence in himself, had 
attempted earlier in his friend's life to turn his 
attention to public concerns, and had even 
reproached him for consciously or uncon- 
sciously hindering the cause of the peace, 
the temperance, and the abolitionist parties ; 
but Lowell failed to make an active propa- 
gandist of Dr. Holmes. What Lowell at- 
tempted unsuccessfully before the days of the 
" Autocrat's " fame many urged at a later 
period, and it is interesting to notice that 
although there was no aloofness, nothing of 
the recluse, as we usually understand it, about 
Dr. Holmes, yet he would not be hindered 
from living his own life, and allowed no urgency 
on the part of friends or enemies to engage 
him in public work for which he wisely felt 
himself unfitted. 



152 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

It must not, however, be thought that 
he was indifferent to public questions : he 
was keenly alive to them, and had the success 
of more than one cause at heart, but he was 
constitutionally incapable of becoming a useful 
part of the machinery of causes ; he hated the 
dullness of business meetings, and everything 
connected with organisation, and it must be 
confessed that he had no great liking for the 
company of that class of serviceable and 
indefatigable people who usually attend to 
such matters. 

" I hate being placed on committees/ ' he says ; " they 
are always having meetings at which half are absent 
and the rest late. I hate being officially and necessarily 
in the presence of men, most of whom either from 
excess of zeal in the good cause or from constitutional 
obtuseness are incapable of being " bored," which state 
is to me the most exhausting. 

M I am slow in apprehending parliamentary rules 
and usages, and averse to the business details many 
people revel in. 

" Some trees grow very tall and straight and large 
in the forest close to each other, but some must stand 
by themselves or they won't grow at all. . . ." 

Dr. Holmes was troubled at times because 
he always had to refuse this kind of help to 
his friends, but he knew that if he engaged 
in such labours it would have to be at the 
expense of his own proper work, and he consoled 
himself and his friends by remarking " that 



Biographer and Traveller. 153 

for every person like himself there were two 
or three organising, contriving, socialising 
intelligences, and three or four self-sacrificing 
people who had forgotten what they liked, 
and about a dozen indifferent folk who would 
take part in anything they were asked to do.'' 
One cause, however, at last stirred his blood 
and aroused him to public activity. He never 
really fought with the abolitionists as a party, 
and it was a long time before his conservative 
tendencies would allow him to sympathise 
with them ; but the war which commenced 
in 1861 set his mind working upon the great 
national issues involved, heated his ever-warm 
patriotism, and kindled that speech which he 
delivered in Boston in 1863, and of which the 
eloquence thrills as one reads it even now. 
His enthusiasm in this cause may be gathered 
from his papers entitled " Bread and the 
Newspaper/' and " My Hunt for the Captain," 
as well as from many passages from his letters ; 
the following quotations are taken from his 
correspondence with Motley : — 

If we have grown unmanly and degenerate in the 
north wind, I am willing that the sirocco should sweep 
us off from the soil. . . . But I have a most solid 
and robust faith in the sterling manhood of the North, 
in its endurance, its capacity for a military training, 
its plasticity for every need in education, in political 
equality, in respect for man as man in peaceful develop- 
ment which is our law, in distinction from aggressive 

11 



154 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

colonisation, in human qualities as against bestial and 
diabolical ones, in the Lord as against the Devil. If 
I never see peace and freedom in this land, I shall have 
faith that my children will see it. If they do not live 
long enough to see it, I believe their children will. 

And on another occasion he writes : — 

The mean sympathisers with the traitors are about 
in the streets under many aspects. . . . But to meet 
young men who have breathed this American air without 
taking the contagious fever of liberty, whose hands lie 
as cold and flabby in yours as the fins of a fish, on the 
morning of a victory — this is the hardest thing to bear. 
Oh ! if the bullets would only go to the hearts that have 
no warm human blood in them ! But the most generous 
of our youth are the price that we must pay for the new 
heaven and the new earth, which are to be born of this 
fiery upheaval. 

Thus the years went by kindly for him, as 
he lived his comparatively untroubled life in 
Boston, enjoying his home, meeting his friends, 
attending the Saturday Club, writing his books, 
lecturing, and attending with a wonderful 
patience to his ever-growing correspondence. 
He spent his summers first at one place and 
then at another, until toward the end of his 
life he settled upon Beverly Farm ; but he was 
always working, there seemed no sign of age 
in him, he was as energetic as ever, his eye was 
undimmed, and his powers unabated. The 
first hint that we have of the coming of old age 
to him was not that his body and intellect were 



Biographer and Traveller. 155 

failing him, but that his friends were failing 
him. There were gaps in his circle of acquaint- 
ance, and empty chairs at the Saturday Club, 
— Agassiz died in 1873, and in 1877 Motley 
followed him. 

Dr. Holmes had been fascinated by Motley : 
" his impulsive, passionate, ambitious, proud, 
sensitive, but always interesting friend/ ' as 
he calls him, and had admitted him to more 
intimate relationship than almost any other 
of his friends, and at Motley's death the friend- 
ship imposed upon Dr. Holmes the task of 
writing his biography, — a task which he 
engaged in with zeal and little feeling of 
disability. The strict limits of biography, 
however, were restraints peculiarly hampering 
to his genius, and moreover there were certain 
aspects of Motley's life, — the public phases 
of his career — which Oliver Wendell Holmes' 
powers did not qualify him to deal with 
adequately. He produced not an impartial 
record and estimate of the life of his friend, 
but a heightened if an eloquent appreciation, 
recalling what was best in his features and 
clothing, his recollections " in the embroidered 
garment of memory." 

The life of Motley was finished in 1878, 
and the next year Dr. Holmes was sharply 
reminded of his age by the manner in which 
his publishers celebrated his seventieth birthday. 



156 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

This anniversary was the occasion of the 
Atlantic breakfast, a great compliment and 
a great honour to him, perhaps the first notable 
public recognition of his services to literature. 
All the well-known literary men were invited, 
and Dr. Holmes was eulogised in speech and 
poem, and received all these marks of appre- 
ciation and esteem with undisguised pleasure. 
In writing to W. D. Howells — now America's 
foremost man of letters and a veteran, but 
then in the midst of his career and manager 
of the " south pole " of this festival — he says : — 

Of course I was pleased — how could I help being 
pleased — with the penetrating and nicely accented 
praise you awarded me. We know the difference 
between a smudge of eulogy and a stroke of character- 
isation. 

Writing to Lowell, he says characteristically 
enough: — 

At half -past six p.m. yesterday I got up from a 
" breakfast " given to me at the Brunswick by the 
publishers of the Atlantic. My friends were there in 
great force. ... I look back on all the fine things 
that were sung and said about me, and feel like a 
royal mummy just embalmed. The only thing is that 
in hearing so much about one's self it makes him think 
he is dead and reading his obituary notices. 

The celebration was a great success and a 
great pleasure to Dr. Holmes ; but although 
it indicated clearly enough among other things 



Biographer and Traveller. 157 

that his publishers had found him a valuable 
investment in the past, it was not a hint that 
they were prepared to see him resign his 
connection with them without regret, and 
although the whole affair was a recognition of 
his genius that sharply reminded him of his 
years, he felt no inclination to lay down the 
pen, or doff the professor's gown. 

His interest in life and his enjoyment of it 
were as keen as ever, and his lively temperament, 
as he says, could not be kept down by the 
added years or the common burdens of 
life. So for a little longer he would not 
disengage himself from any of his duties, and 
continued his literary work and his medical 
lectures. 

In 1882, his friendships suffered again by 
the death of Emerson and Longfellow ; the 
boughs must needs be shaken and the other 
leaves fall, if one would be the " last leaf," 
and Oliver Wendell Holmes found himself 
already among the few who remained of the 
class of 1829, and the friends of his generation 
in the minority at the Saturday Club. He 
decided to relieve himself a little, and to curtail 
his work, in order that what he still had to do 
should not suffer in quality through his over- 
burdening himself, and in 1882 he resigned his 
lectureship at Harvard, a position which he 
had occupied for five-and-thirty years. 



158 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

" I had a very pleasant opening offered to me," (by 
his publishers) he writes, " and as I had had about 
enough of schoolmastering, I took off my professor's 
gown, and now I am in my literary shirt sleeves/ ' 

His resignation was the occasion of something 
like a demonstration on the part of the students, 
which has been mentioned, and his farewell 
address to them contains his first reluctant 
admission of the effect of age : — 

I have helped to wear these stairs into hollows — 
stairs which I trod when they were smooth and level, 
fresh from the plane. There are just thirty-two of them 
as there were five-and-thirty years ago, but they are 
steeper and harder to climb it seems to me than they 
were then. 

Honours, and a large recognition of his 
services to medicine and literature gratified 
him during his last years : everyone was 
anxious that he should quit the stage amply 
robed. Harvard University dignified him with 
a D.C.L. in 1880, and upon his resignation 
of the Chair of Anatomy he was made Emeritus 
Professor. The medical faculty of New York 
feted him in the spring of the following year, 
and when he made his tour to Europe in 1886, 
Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh conferred 
honorary degrees upon him. 

Dr. Holmes was very flattered by these 
honours, and was very susceptible to such 
distinctions ; there was nothing irritating about 



Biographer and Traveller. 159 

his frank enjoyment of the praises and good 
opinion of his friends and the public recognition 
of his position as a man of letters ; but it must 
be recorded as one of his redeeming vices 
perhaps, that in old age if not in his earlier 
days, he suffered a little from vanity, that next 
to last infirmity of noble minds. " I bought 
me a new silk gown and went to Commence- 
ment, and they made me an LL.D./' he wrote 
to James Russell Lowell, after receiving this 
distinction from Harvard. 

His reception at the English Universities 
in 1886 was particularly gratifying. At Cam- 
bridge the undergraduates saluted him with 
a new and appropriate version of an old song, 
and shouted to the echo " Holmes, sweet 
Holmes/' which the doctor was very happy 
to receive as a tribute. An eye-witness of 
the ceremony at Oxford quoted by Mr. Morse, 
says, " But the gallery gods had heartier 
applause for Dr. Holmes, whose almost boyish 
countenance told them of the eternal youth 
in the poet's heart. What a quick response 
there was from those other hearts up aloft, 
who knew that the good Doctor would not 
mind the unbridled licence they enjoy one 
day in the year. The complimentary address 
was being read, Dr. Holmes standing in his 
scarlet finery, but the noise in the gallery was 
deafening." If the early part of his life had 



160 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

been vigorous and full of interest because full 
of work, the latter part was full of honours 
and sympathy and encouragement, which 
" cheated the least promising season of life 
of much that seemed to render it dreary." 

The death of Emerson, which we have 
mentioned as taking place in 1882, was 
the occasion of his second and last attempt 
at biographical literature. He had known 
Emerson for a long while, and counted him a 
friend, but the natures of these two men did 
not allow of the closest intimacy between 
them. It is true to say that Dr. Holmes did 
not deeply appreciate the philosophy which 
Emerson's life, as much as his writings, was 
an expression of, and those who had given 
themselves up to the admiration of the Concord 
philosopher, regarded Dr. Holmes as an unsuit- 
able biographer, and looked with some anxiety 
for his interpretation of their master ; and 
they would have had more occasion for concern 
if they had known to what a negligible extent 
Dr. Holmes had been influenced by Emerson, 
and how little he really knew of his work. 
This passage quoted by Mr. Morse indicates, 
as he says, an unpromising attitude for a 
biographer : "I find the study of Emerson 
curiously interesting/' and " I took it up " 
(the preparation of a biography) " very reluct- 
antly, having been a late comer as an admirer 



Biographer and Traveller. 161 

of the Concord poet and philosopher. But 
I have got interested in it, and am reading 
and studying to get at the true inwardness 
of this remarkable being and his world." 

If studying his subject could have equipped 
him as a biographer, he would have produced 
an unimpeachable work, for he spared no 
pains and left no possible source of information 
unattempted ; and he did, in fact, write a 
memoir which is far superior to his life of 
Motley, and which can be read with pleasure 
not only because it is so redolent of the author, 
but because it is full of luminous remarks 
about Emerson and a careful if not complete 
exposition of his work. But it was not accepted 
as a good biography, or a full appreciation, 
and the truth about Dr. Holmes' disability 
as the author of Emerson's life is perhaps 
found in this passage from a letter he received 
from Mr. Hoar : — "I do not believe you have 
got hold of all there was in Emerson, any more 
than I thought in his lifetime that he understood 
all there was in you. Indeed, ' much medita- 
ting ' these things, I incline to think that a 
perfect sympathy is only possible in a disciple 
and admirer — pure and simple — who has no 
separate gift or quality of his own." It 
would not be fair to suggest that this corres- 
pondent or the reading public had no praise 
for this work : it was, in fact, well received 



162 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

in some quarters, and has been largely read, 
but the following sentence, taken with the 
quotation above, perhaps represents the opinion 
of those who were capable of estimating the 
value of Dr. Holmes' attempt : — " I think 
the book is admirably done, and will be of the 
greatest value in making Emerson's public 
and your public — so far as they are not the 
same — better acquainted. * ' 

Dr. Holmes' biography has been the occasion 
of some excellent essays, and it is perhaps worth 
mentioning those by Augustine Birrell and 
John Morley, the latter of whose study of 
Emerson is likely to give the reader a better 
appreciation of the man and philosopher than 
Dr. Holmes' biography. 



CHAPTER IX. 



Then Old Age said again : Come let us walk down 
the street together — and offered me a cane, an eyeglass 
and a tippet, and a pair of overshoes. No, much obliged 
to you, said I, I don't want those things, and I had a 
little rather talk to you here, privately in my study. 
So I dressed myself up in a jaunty way and walked out 
alone ; got a fall ; caught a cold and was laid up with 
lumbago, and had time to think over this whole matter. 

— The Professor's Paper. 

TOURING a long life, Dr. Holmes had been 
spared much suffering or much sorrow ; 
his days had followed one another easily and 
pleasantly, and though there had been plenty 
of hard work, he had beside the enjoyment 
which comes from a keen interest in one's 
particular work, that other relish and stimulus 
which results from hearty appreciation of 
it by one's contemporaries. 

But Dr. Holmes lived too long to be exempted 
from pressing sorrow : death had beckoned 
many of his friends, but their places were 
partly taken by the new friends his winning 
personality was always attracting to him, 

163 



I 



164 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

and it was not until 1884 that the shadow 
feared by man fell athwart his own hearth 
and rested on his son Edward. 

" It seems to me/' he wrote, " that I have been 
living with sorrow of late — grief of my own and that of 
others. The loss of my son Edward comes back to 
me every day as I think of all that life promised him if 
he could but have had the health to enjoy it." 

But neither this bereavement nor those that 
he suffered soon after, were able to spoil his 
last years. He bowed beneath every stroke 
that fell, but his fine nature would not allow 
him to be broken by them, and the effect of 
his private sorrow is chiefly seen in the gracious 
spirit that informs his letters of sympathy 
to those who were suffering from similar 
bereavement. Writing to one friend who had 
lost a child, he says : — 

How can one " comfort " another under such an 
affliction as yours ? Not certainly by phrases — rather 
by those assurances of sympathy which all hearts ask 
in their supreme moments of trial. . . . There are 
no graves that grow so green as the graves of children. 
Their memory comes back after a time more beautiful 
than that of those who leave us at any other age, because 
life has not had time to strip them of those " clouds of 
glory " they come trailing with them " from Heaven 
which is their home." 

Grief, added to the number of his years, made 
him begin to experience his age, so to speak. 
He noted, too, his failing sight, his less acute 



"The Last Leaf." 165 

sense of hearing ; and was overcome now and 
again with a sense of loneliness when he recol- 
lected the many he set out with and the few 
that walked beside him now. But his buoyant 
nature always reasserted itself, and to the 
last he felt he had still some work to do ; and 
moreover he never forgot the compensations 
of old age. 

" Grow old, my dear boys, grow old ! " he wrote 
to some of his friends. " Your failings are forgotten ; 
your virtues are over-rated ; there is just enough of 
pity in the love that is borne you to give it a tenderness 
all its own. The horizon line of age moves forward by 
decades. At sixty, seventy seems to bound the land- 
scape ; at seventy, the eye rests on the line of eighty ; 
at eighty we can see through the mist, and still in the 
distance, a ruin or two of ninety." 

This was written in 1885, the year in which 
he produced " A Mortal Antipathy/' which 
has been mentioned. 

The following year, in company with his 
daughter, he made a memorable tour. 

" After an interval of more than fifty years," he said, 
" I propose taking a second look at some parts of Europe. 
It is a Rip Van Winkle experiment which I am promising 
myself." 

It certainly seemed a daring adventure for 
an asthmatical old gentleman of seventy- 
seven years of age, but it proved one of the 
most pleasant episodes in his life. What he 



166 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

really did was to make not a tour through 
Europe, but a triumphal march through the 
halls of London society : he was welcomed, 
courted, feted, praised, wherever he went, 
and he was free to go wherever he wished. 
The record of his doings in London and else- 
where during his trip is to be found in " Our 
Hundred Days in Europe," which he published 
on his return home, and in which he recalls 
every incident with boyish relish, and shows 
an excessive anxiety to express his gratitude. 
The welcome he received certainly did credit to 
the English people whom he had not been ready 
to appreciate in his early days, but to whom he 
made amends both before and after his last tour. 
When he returned home and had satisfied 
his anxiety to be grateful enough by publishing 
" Our Hundred Days," he engaged in his last 
literary project and commenced the series 
of papers entitled " Over the Tea Cups." The 
death of his wife saddened this year, and so 
affected his health as to make work impossible. 
His papers to the Atlantic were discontinued 
for some months, but he eventually settled 
down to complete them, and had scarcely 
done so when his only daughter died. Writing 
to some friends, who had expressed their 
appreciation of his last work, he says : — 

I am living just as when you were here, but the loss 
of my daughter is not one to be made good in this life. 



"The Last Leaf." 167 

. . . The way in which the tea-cups was received 
was very gratifying, but oh ! if only those whom I have 
lost could have shared my satisfaction. I do not expect 
to write any more books. 

The years dealt very gently with Oliver 
Wendell Holmes from this time until his death : 
every day brought fresh witness of his great 
reputation, everybody was anxious to be of 
service to him, and what helped him most of 
all was his quiet determination to be thankful 
for all he had been enabled to do and enjoy, 
and be patient and even cheerful under anything 
he might have to endure. 

When James Freeman Clarke died, he said 
in writing to a friend : — 

We cannot disguise the fact — the keystone of our 
arch has slid and fallen, and all we can do is to lean 
against each other until the last stone is left standing 
alone. But we must not come together, such of us as are 
left, for tears and lamentations. If the meetings are 
not cheerful and hopeful, they will be looked forward 
to with pain instead of pleasure. 

When they did meet in the next year, 
the year of his eightieth birthday, Dr. Holmes 
contributed his customary poem and a cheerful 
presence, so that the meeting of the six old 
men who were left from the class of 1829 went 
off " pretty well," as he says. He wrote to 
Whittier just after his birthday celebrations 
this year : — 



168 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

Here I am at your side among the octogenarians. 
At seventy we are objects of veneration : at eighty of 
curiosity. 

These few quotations will indicate the spirit 
and cheerfulness with which he accepted, 
and even prosecuted the life of every day 
that was still given him. To Mrs. Kellogg he 
wrote : — 

I go to the symphony rehearsals, and to a five o'clock 
tea once in a while. I dine out at long intervals, every- 
body of my generation being dead, pretty much, — my 
two young people go to the theatre together — but I rarely 
accompany them. Once in a while we all dine at some 
public table — Young's or Parker's — just for the fun 
of it, and by way of change. Mrs. Judge knows how to 
make me comfortable, and does it wonderfully well. 
But I grow lazy . . . Yet when I talk of laziness 
I am really kept very busy. Here I am writing to you at 
4.30 p.m. this Saturday : ten to one the door-bell will 
ring in the course of the next fifteen minutes, and a 
school-ma'am from Oshkosh, or an author from Dakota, 
or a poetess from Belcher town will come in and interrupt 
me. 

When he was eighty- three he wrote : — 

I am reading right and left — whatever turns up, but 
especially re-reading old books. Two new volumes of 
Dr. Johnson's letters have furnished me part of my 
reading. 

He was also employed during this year in 
writing his autobiography, and found living 
over his past life and putting on record, the 



"The Last Leaf." 169 

most easy and enjoyable of literary labours, 
but he was unable to proceed very far with 
this work. 

The year before his death he wrote : — 

My birthday found me very well in body, and I think 
in mind. ... I am only reasonably deaf ; my 
two promising cataracts are so slow about their work 
that I begin to laugh at them . . . and I can see 
with both my eyes and read with one ; and my writer's 
cramp is very considerate, and is letting me write 
without interference, as you can see. 
I wrote a hymn a few months ago. 

Every birthday as it came brought an 
avalanche of letters and tokens of regard, and 
it was after his last birthday that he wrote : — 

I am scattering thanks right and left — from hands 
as full as they can hold. Your kind expressions are very 
grateful to me. They do me good — old age at best is 
lonely, and the process of changing one's whole suit of 
friends and acquaintances has its moments when one 
feels naked and shivers. ... I have been con- 
templating the leafless boughs and the brown turf in the 
garden of my memory. 

Less than a month after writing this letter 
he died quietly, without pain and without 
suffering of any kind, just slipping out of one 
life into another. 



12 



CHAPTER X. 

CONCLUSION. 

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife ; , 
Nature I loved, and after Nature Art. 

I warmed both hands before the fire of life ; 
It sinks, and I am ready to depart. 

— Landor. 

TT is difficult when considering the quiet 
A and uneventful life of Oliver Wendell 
Holmes, to recollect that he lived in stirring 
times, and through one of the most remarkable 
half centuries of our history ; but when we do 
remember this fact, and turn to his most 
characteristic work, we find striking evidence 
of it in almost every page. 

A passage taken from his introduction to 
"Our Hundred Days " brings vividly before 
us the changes that took place during the 
half century that separated his two visits to 
Europe : — 

I left the England of William the Fourth, of the 
Duke of Wellington, of Sir Robert Peel. I went from 

170 



Conclusion. 171 

Manchester to Liverpool by the new railway — the only 
one I saw in Europe. I looked upon England from 
the box of a stage-coach, 

and then he goes on to say with what pleasure 
he should tell some wise men of the past of the 
ocean steamers — of the railroads that spread 
themselves like cobwebs over the civilised 
and half-civilised portions of the earth — the 
telephone — the telegraph — the photograph and 
the spectrum : — 

I should hand him a paper with the morning news from 
London to read by the electric light ; I should startle 
him with a friction match ; I should amaze him with 
the incredible truths about anaesthesia ; I should 
astonish him with the latter conclusions of geology ; 
I should confound him with the revolutionary apocalypse 
of Darwinism. All this change in the aspects, position, 
beliefs of humanity since the date of my own graduation 
from College. 

It is necessary to remember this when 
speaking of Oliver Wendell Holmes, because 
his literary instrument is as much the product 
of this half century as the railway and the 
telegraph ; and, moreover, although his point 
of view was American, and he was national 
in this sense, and although he was intensely 
provincial, yet his ideas and his whole estimate 
of life and what appears most original and 
characteristic about his way of enforcing these, 
belongs not to America, or England, or Oliver 
Wendell Holmes, but to the nineteenth century 



172 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

and his intuitive apprehension of its bearing. 

His attitude to religion illustrates this per- 
fectly well,, for much that he was abused for 
uttering upon this subject in his early career 
could be freely spoken of in the drawing-room 
in his later life, and has became part of our 
creed to-day, and the whole of the creed of a 
great body of people. He accepted and taught 
willingly and almost instinctively what has 
taken nearly a century to gain a reluctant 
acceptance. 

There is no need at this time of day to 
justify Dr. Holmes' challenge to an attitude 
of mind considered the most devout, but 
stigmatised by him as degrading, and to dogmas 
that seemed both stupid and cruel ; but it is 
as well to remind the reader that Holmes himself 
was a deeply religious, even devout man, that 
he never attacked Christianity itself, nor do 
his works ever betray that bitter and narrow 
scepticism which is too often intolerant of good 
and bad alike. 

What Dr. Holmes waged war against was 
gloom ; as Stevenson said, Zola was funda- 
mentally at enmity with joy, so Oliver Wendell 
Holmes was fundamentally at variance with 
gloom, whether it was Puritan gloom, or the 
gloom of the pessimist, or the gloom that many 
allowed the sad vicissitudes of life to shadow 
them with, and he sought to disperse shadows 



Conclusion. 173 

by the warmth and brightness of his personality 
as well as by his reason and imagination. It 
was inevitable, therefore, from the time and 
place and manner of his birth and upbringing, 
that he would challenge the paralysing gloom 
and the harsh prejudice that still lingered 
in the New England atmosphere, and it was 
equally inevitable that many good men should 
mistake the direction of his antagonism and 
regard him as an enemy of Christianity. What 
he really attacked was " anything that is 
brutal, cruel, heathenish, that makes life 
hopeless for the most of mankind, and perhaps 
for entire races ; anything that assumes the 
necessity of the extermination of instincts 
which were given to be regulated, no matter 
by what name you call it, no matter whether 
a fakir, a monk or a deacon believes it." 
He considered that a man who did not attack, 
but held and believed such things ought to 
be incapable of retaining both his reason and 
his faith. He had no wish to remit one iota 
of religious truth ; what he was concerned 
about was that his generation should be content 
to remain within the religious confines of the 
partial and narrow construction of a preceding 
age. He only said, in his own somewhat 
startling way, what all men are prepared to 
say to-day, namely that every generation 
must restate in its own terms and reconstruct 



174 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

by its own light and knowledge its religion 
as well as its science. He urged men to exercise 
their faith not only by worship but by doubt 
and investigation, so that that healthy, vital 
change which takes place in bodies and sloughs 
off what is dead and useless might also take 
place in religion. 

His own creed in so far as he had one was 
the first two words of the Pater Noster, and he 
would admit nothing that denied directly 
or by implication the Fatherhood of God. 
Writing to Mrs. Stowe, he tried with indifferent 
success to formulate his beliefs, and the 
following quotations indicate clearly the basis 
of his hope and of his religious life. 

That it is more consonant with our ideas of what is 
best to suppose that suffering, which is often obviously 
disciplinary and benevolent in its aim, is to be temporary 
rather than eternal. 

That the Deity must be as good as the best conscious 
being He makes. 

That if the Deity expects the genuine love and respect 
of independent thinking creatures, He must in the 
long run treat them as a good father would treat them. 

It was suffering that troubled his faith more 
than anything else, — not his own but that 
of others — and toward the end of his life he 
said if he lived to be a few years older he 
would be nothing but pity. To the friend to 
whom he said this, he wrote : — 



Conclusion. 175 

To you I suppose sin is the mystery — to me suffering 
is. I trust Love will prove the solution of both. At any 
rate no atomic philosophy can prevent my hoping that 
it will prove so. 

It is true that he eventually applied his 
belief in hereditary and pre-natal influence 
so as almost to exclude the idea of sin from his 
estimate of life, and though he never was 
deserving of the low abuse he received in 
consequence, he cannot claim even to-day the 
support of either Science or Christianity in 
doing so. 

The Unitarian revival was in full swing during 
his early days, and its influence upon him is 
very marked, — it coloured his whole outlook, 
— and he adhered to the Unitarian body 
more or less during his entire life : but he often 
attended other places of worship, and used to 
say that no door was too narrow to admit him 
to worship. Writing to Phillips Brooks, he 
says : — 

My natural Sunday home is King's Chapel, where 
a good and amiable and acceptable preacher tries to 
make us better with a purity and sincerity which we 
admire and love. In that Church I have worshipped 
half a century. . . . There on the fifteenth of June, 
1840, I was married ; there my children were all chris- 
tened ; from that Church the dear companion of so 
many blessed years was buried. In her seat I must 
sit, and through its door I hope to be carried to my 
resting-place. 



176 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

It is well to think that before his death all 
misunderstanding had ceased, and all good 
men were agreed in regarding him not as an 
antagonist but as a protagonist ; and those 
who were forbidden in their childhood to read 
the " Autocrat " because of its irreligious 
tendencies, were willing to hand it to their 
own children with pleasure. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes will occupy a con- 
siderable place in the history of American 
literature, because he developed a new vein ; 
but it is likely that most of his works will cease 
to be read before long, because they are not 
sufficiently the work of an artist to endure 
after the lessons they were mainly written to 
teach have been accepted, and it is everywhere 
evident that much that Oliver Wendell Holmes 
sought to enforce has by his efforts as well 
as by the inevitable trend of the times, gained 
acceptance. But the " Autocrat " will prob- 
ably remain, because it belongs to that class of 
books which have the power of making a man 
suddenly aware of himself and the universe, 
and there are many who would mention the 
reading of the " Autocrat " as the occasion of 
a kind of mental conversion or new birth. As 
there are certain substances in the animal 
organism whose peculiar function is to produce 
activity in secretions that would otherwise 
remain inert, so there are certain books which 



Conclusion. 177 

seem to have a similar power in respect to 
latent intellect ; they do more than stimulate 
— they liberate the mind, and leave a man a 
new creature. 

This perhaps may account for the fact that 
such a book as the " Autocrat/' to those 
whom it has influenced in the way that has 
been mentioned, appears almost a dull book 
upon a second or a third reading. It has 
accomplished its work so rapidly, has been 
assimilated at once and has nothing further 
to teach. Of course, it is not to all readers 
that the "Autocrat" comes in this way, and 
probably its influence depends partly upon 
the reader, — his age and the condition of his 
mind, — but it certainly has the power of bring- 
ing some minds suddenly, as it seems, to awake- 
ness and independence. 

No further discussion of Dr. Holmes' works 
must be entered upon here, however ; the 
question of how long an " immortality " an 
author may achieve by his writings is of no 
importance compared to the character of his 
influence, and Dr. Holmes is as likely to live 
by virtue of the influence alluded to in this 
quotation as by any degree of art or scholarship 
or originality which his books denote. 

I do not know what to make of it sometimes when 
I receive a letter, it may be, from Oregon or Omaha, 
from England or Australia, telling me I have unlocked 

13 



178 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

the secret chamber of some heart which others infinitely 
more famous and infinitely more entitled to claim the 
freedom have failed to find opening for them. This has 
happened to me so often from so many different persons 
— men and women, young and old — that I cannot help 
believing there is some human tone in my written voice, 
which sometimes finds a chord not often set vibrating. 



INDEX. 



Ashmun, Mr., 23. 

Atlantic Monthly, 73, 112, 156. 

Barnes, Phineas, 19, 20, 51. 
Bigelow, George T., 19. 
Boyer, M., 36. 
Bradstreet, Mrs., 5. 
Bret Harte, 117. 
Broussais, M., 36. 

Clark, James Freeman, 19, 21, 

167. 
Curtis, B. R., 19. 

Dana, R., 11. 
Dane School, 23. 
Dickens, Charles, 55. 

Emerson, R. W., 160. 

Foster, John, 16. 

Harvard, 19, 56, 158. 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 62. 
Hoar, Mr., 161. 
Howells, W. D., 156. 
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, birth- 
place, 1 . 

Ancestors, 4. 

Early years, 8. 

School-days, 1 1 . 

Early influences, 13, 22. 

At Harvard, 19. 

Studies law, 23. 

Early poems, 24. 



Holmes, Oliver Wendell (con.) 
Medical student, 26. 
Sails for Europe, 29. 
Life in Paris, 30. 
In London, 40. 
First train ride, 41, 171. 
Returns to America, 46. 
General practitioner, 47. 
Prizes for medical essays, 

49. 

Publishes first volume of 
poems, 51. 

Marriage, 51. 

Children, 52. 

Controversy over puer- 
peral fever, 54. 

Parkman Professor at 
Harvard, 55. 

As lecturer, 57, 63. 

Opposed to vivisection, 58. 

Presentation from stu- 
dents, 59. 

Views on women as 
doctors, 59. 

At Pittsfield, 62. 

The "Autocrat" 66, 67 
et seq, no. 

Poet, 87 et seq. 

As humorist, 96. 

The Saturday club, 112. 

As correspondent, 116; 

The "Professor," 119. 

The " Poet," 121. 



179 



i8o 



Index. 



Holmes, Oliver Wendell (con.) 
" Over the Tea-cups," 122, 

166. 
" Elsie Venner," 126. 
Recreations, 136. 
"The Guardian Angel/' 

"A Mortal Antipathy," 144. 

"Medical Essays," 149. 

Friendships, 150. 

Life of J. L. Motley, 155. 

Seventieth birthday, 156. 

Honours, 158. 

Tour in Europe, 158, 165. 

At Cambridge, 159. 

Biography of Emerson, 
160. 

" One Hundred Days in 
Europe," 166, 170. 

Eightieth birthday, 167. 

Death, 169 
Holmes, Emra, 5. 
Holmes, Admiral Sir Robert, 5. 
Holmes, John, 6. 
Holmes, Deacon, 6. 
Holmes, Abiel (father of O. W. 

H.), 6, 15 ; death of, 51. 
Holmes, Sarah (mother of O. 

W. H.), 6, 8, 29. 
Holmes, Amelia Lee (wife of 

O.W.H.), 51. 
Holmes, Judge (son of O. W. 

H.), 53, 153. 
Holmes, Edward (son of O. W. 
H.), 53, 164. 

Irving, Edward, 40. 

Jackson, Dr. 27, 28. 
Jackson, Amelia Lee, 51. 



Jackson, Judge, 51. 
Judge, Mrs. 168. 

Kellogg, Mrs. 168. 

Lachapelle, Madame, 59. 
Laney, M., 35. 
Louis, 37, 42, 57. 
Lowell, James Russell, 65, 
66, 120, 151, 156, 159. 

Macrae, David, 56. 
Melville, Herman, 62. 
Mitford, Miss, 56, 103, 139. 
Morse, J. T., 58, 136. 
Motley, J. L., 153, 155. 

Osgood, David, 16. 
Osier, Dr., 61. 

Percy, Lord, 3. 
Philip's Academy, 18. 
Phi Beta Kappa Society, 55. 
Pittsfield, 62. 

Record, M., 36. 

Sala, George Augustus, 82. 
Sargent, J., 62. 
Saturday Club, 112, 154, 155 
Stead, W.T., 89. 
Story, Judge, 23. 
Sutton, Mr. Bland, 147. 

Velpeau, M., 36. 

Ward, General, 2. 
Washington, George, 2, 4. 
Wendell, Sarah, 6. 
Whittier, J. G., 167. 



